


Christmas at Eden Tree Farm

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Hallmark Movie AU, Holidays, No Smut, Winter, all plot points crowdsourced via Twitter polls so really this is all Y'ALL'S fault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 08:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13096233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: When Abby Griffin decides to move back to Arkadia – the quaint, Vermont town where she grew up - she’s looking for a fresh start, not a trip down memory lane.  But a snowstorm damages the roof of her new house, sending Abby to the only inn Arkadia has to offer: Eden Tree Lodge, a historic guesthouse and Christmas tree farm.  Marcus Kane, the owner, inherited the business from his mother, and he and the Griffins were once friends; but they parted on bad terms and haven’t spoken in years.  Abby’s hopes of avoiding an awkward run-in are dashed when she arrives on his doorstep with a trunk full of suitcases and finds neither Marcus, nor his jealous fiancée Diana, at all pleased to see her.  Meanwhile, her daughter Clarke’s disappointment at spending Christmas in a hotel increases when she learns that Kane refuses to celebrate it, or even decorate (despite the hundreds of Christmas trees at his disposal).  The Griffin women are determined to make Eden Tree Lodge and its grumpy owner merry for the holidays by hook or by crook; as Christmas grows closer, so do Abby and Marcus, as the decades-long estrangement between them slowly crumbles away, forcing them both to unlock doors into their past they would rather leave unopened.





	1. December 1st

**Author's Note:**

> This fantastic Hallmark movie cover artwork was created by the amazingly talented fire-of-the-sun on Tumblr, who is a true gift to this fandom.

 

* * *

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

_“No.”_

“Pleeeeeeease?”

“Oh, for the love of God, Octavia, we could do this all day,” Marcus Kane sighed wearily, rubbing his temples and closing his eyes to ward off the headache that always seemed to appear like magic when his stubborn young employee wanted something and didn’t get it.  “We have this conversation every year.  Can't we just save ourselves some time and fast-forward straight to the part where you finally realize I’m not going to change my mind and you stomp off in a temper so I can go back to work?”

She didn’t say anything right away, but it was too much to hope that she’d given up so easily.  He opened his eyes to see that the slight, dark-haired, angular girl standing in the doorway of his office was currently glaring at him in ferocious displeasure, arms folded across her chest.  Octavia Blake was not a tall young woman, but what she lacked in height she more than made up in sheer inexhaustible tenacity. 

This could go on for awhile.

“You realize this is a _Christmas tree farm_ ,” she began pointedly, once she had his attention.

“Is it? Really? I wondered what all those Fraser firs were doing there.  I thought it was just someone’s very overgrown backyard.”

“Marcus –"

“It’s my family’s business, Octavia,” he reminded her, returning to the stack of receipts he was entering into their accounting software and refusing any longer to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was distracting him.  “I’ve been working here since before you were born.  I do, in fact, know that this is a Christmas tree farm.”

 “A Christmas tree farm which you _refuse to decorate for Christmas_.”

“Octavia –"

“You won’t even put up one of your _own trees_.”

“That’s not entirely fair,” he corrected her.  “I let you decorate the farm.  You can have all the festive holiday hullabaloo you want down there. Have at it.  Stick a giant inflatable sleigh on the barn roof for all I care.  The farm and the tree lot are Indra’s turf.  She makes the rules.  If she wants to wear a Santa suit all day and hire a troop of damned carolers I won’t stop her.”

“But you're not going to decorate the lodge.”

“No.  For the thousandth time.  I am not going to decorate the lodge.”

“You’re being an idiot,” Octavia snapped at him, also for the thousandth time.  “Think of the holiday revenue you could generate if this place was a little more festive.  The lodge could do a ton more business.”

“It does plenty of business.  We’re at 65% guest capacity for the month.”

“You could be at 100%.”

“Octavia –"

“You could have a waiting list.”

“I don’t want a waiting list.”

“Marcus –"

“Octavia, I said no.  I like the lodge the way it is.”

“You’re a Scrooge.”

“That’s rather an improvement,” he said mildly, “I think last year you decided I was a Grinch.”

“You’re both.”

“I’m really not.  I’m a very nice person once you get to know me.”

“A very nice person who hates Christmas.”

“I don’t hate Christmas.  I just hate fuss.”

“Scrooge.”

“Careful,” he chided her.  “Scrooge still signs your paychecks.”

She made a derisive little grumbling sound, which managed to simultaneously convey a grudging acknowledgment of his tyrannical hold over her (in the form of her salary), while still registering her immense displeasure at every single thing about him in this current moment. 

Marcus repressed a smile as he went back to pretending to ignore her.  Octavia Blake only loved about five people in the entire world, and Marcus Kane was one of them, so their arguments never really stuck (though many of them, like the current one, did tend to repeat themselves).  He was perfectly aware that his employees found him a baffling and paradoxical creature, a Christmas tree farm owner who didn’t enjoy Christmas.  But it was complicated to explain, even to someone like Octavia, tangled up as it was with so many aspects of his past he preferred not to revisit. 

Besides, he liked Eden Tree Lodge just as it was, the way his mother had left it.  Spare and clean and open, warm dark wood and plaid flannel upholstery, exposed beams and brickwork.  He liked it tidy.  He liked his space.  The notion of cluttering it up with trees and wreaths and bells and ornaments gave him a feeling of something rather like claustrophobia which he preferred not to examine too closely.

“Compromise?” suggested Octavia finally.  “Just a tree and a wreath.  Nothing on your floor” (the whole former attic of the house was Marcus’ private residence) “and nothing fussy.  Just some greenery, so it smells like Christmas.”

“If they want to smell pine trees they can open a window,” he retorted.  “No tree, Octavia. You’re not going to wear me down this year.”

“But –"

_“No.”_

Ungraciously conceding defeat, Octavia huffed an exasperated teenage sigh (exaggerated for dramatic effect, since she was actually twenty), and stomped out of the office, leaving her boss in blissful peace and silence for approximately thirty seconds before the next intruder came calling.

“From the look on Octavia’s face,” said Indra, the farm manager, her always-dry voice tinged with amusemennt, “I take it she was here to make her annual plea for you to decorate the lodge and the guest rooms for Christmas.”

“Oh, good grief,” Marcus sighed.  “Not you too.”

Indra shook her head.  “It’s nothing to do with me,” she shrugged.  “The lodge is your department.  I just run the tree crew.  I’m not here to tell you how to do your job.”

“Thank you.”

There was a faint pause.  “Except . . .” Indra began cautiously, her tone shifting slightly as she seated herself in the chair opposite his desk, and his heart sank.  She noted the look of resignation on his face and arched her eyebrow slightly.  “You look like you already know what I'm about to say,” she remarked.

“I'm fairly sure I do, yes,” he sighed, leaning back in his chair and meeting her eyes squarely.  This conversation wasn’t likely to be any easier than the last one.  “All right.  Out with it.”

“Is it true you finally decided to sell the land?”

“I haven’t decided anything.  Where did you hear that I had?”

“From Bellamy.”

“And where did Bellamy hear it?”

“From your girlfriend,” Indra replied, her voice pressing ever-so-slightly too hard on that last word to make certain Marcus registered her distaste.  The staff had been . . . well, “resistant,” to put it mildly, after Marcus had gotten engaged earlier this spring, and their collective refusal to adopt the word “fiancée” was one of their recurring minor acts of rebellion.  Marcus had tried to mend fences where he could, but the downside of dating a woman who didn’t give a damn whether people liked her or not was that he found it rather difficult to motivate either side to put in much effort toward getting along.

“Well then, she’s putting the cart before the horse a bit.  Or sleigh, if that makes you feel more festive.”

“Marcus –"

“I haven’t decided.”

“Your family has owned this land for a hundred and twenty-seven years.”

“I know that.”

“And I need to be able to tell my crew whether they still have jobs.”

“They’re all on contract through the 31st, Indra, I would never go back on that. Everyone’s payroll is banked, everyone’s job is safe, we’re set through the winter sales season.  Nothing to worry about right now.”

“Sales is just one piece of it,” Indra reminded him.  “This may be our busy time, but it’s not our _only_ time.  They want to know whether their contracts are going to be renewed for next year, to tend the trees and plant the new ones and work the land.”

“You’ll know when I know.”

“I’m not going to tell you what decision to make,” she said frankly.  “That’s your business.  But a lot of people’s livelihoods are hanging in the balance while you wait to figure out what to do.”

“It’s not that simple, I’m afraid,” he responded, rubbing his temples wearily again.  “There are a number of factors to consider.”

“Money, you mean.”

“The money’s part of it, yes, but there’s also . . .”  Marcus stopped short, not quite sure how to go on. 

He was fond of Indra, always had been, and over the past six years since she’d taken over as manager of Eden Tree Farm she’d become one of his closest friends, but there were so many things he couldn’t really talk to her about. 

Like Callie. 

Or his mother. 

Or all the reasons why Octavia’s simple request to string a few Christmas lights and put up a tree was met with such implacable resistance. 

Or why the possibility of selling the family land and disappearing to somewhere else, a new place with no memories, had struck him as so wildly tempting when the aforementioned girlfriend, of whom Indra clearly thought so little, had first brought it up.

Marcus Kane was born in Arkadia.  So were his parents, and their parents, and their parents before.  He’d gone away to college in New York, with some adolescent notion of possibly studying history or world literature or languages – something where he’d get to travel – but had been forced to drop out in the middle of his sophomore year when his father died, so he could return home and help his mother Vera run the family business.  The Christmas tree farm itself was only half of it; Eden Tree Lodge was also Arkadia’s only inn, and between the two it was a full-time, year-round job to keep the place afloat.  So Marcus dutifully put his dreams of travel on the shelf, stepped into his father’s shoes to serve as co-manager of the farm, married his high school girlfriend Callie, and settled back into small town life.  Together, he and Vera and Callie had kept the place thriving, and life was, if not exciting, at least reasonably content.

Then, ten years ago, his mother died, followed by Callie seven years later.  So now there was no one. 

There was only Marcus, alone.

Not to say he had no help, of course.  Indra was invaluable, and she led the tree crew with an iron fist.  She managed the entire farm year-round, not just the sales but planting and maintenance too.  Octavia was her second-in-command, managing the staff and general operations.  Octavia’s boyfriend Lincoln was the primary field hand, and her brother Bellamy managed a new program they’d started a few years ago for seasonal volunteer help.  Bellamy didn’t work at the lodge year-round like his sister – he was, in fact, currently pursuing a masters in Greek, something for which his sister ribbed him endlessly –  but every December he returned to supervise a team of what Octavia had lovingly nicknamed “the delinquents” – a motley crew of young people participating in court-ordered community service to avoid juvenile detention.  Marcus had been skeptical at first; the idea of turning his land over to a hundred teenage convicts struck him as potentially fraught with peril.  But Bellamy had a knack for keeping them in line, and more than a few of them had turned out to be diligent, hardy workers the crew planned to keep around.

Marcus was fond of his staff, but it wasn’t the same.  At the end of the day, they all went back to their own lives, and there was no one left but him.  With Callie there, with his mother there, this place had been home.  The only home he knew.  Now it was just his job - except that he also lived here, which meant he couldn’t escape it.  But it had stopped being “home” a long time ago.

“If she’s pressuring you to sell the land,” Indra began, but Marcus shook his head.

“She’s not.”

“Because she seems much more enthusiastic about it than you are.”

“I’m . . . not unenthusiastic.  I’m just still deciding.”

“Deciding on what, darling?” came a crisp, elegant female voice from the hallway, and Indra did not even bother to conceal the grimace that flickered over her face as Marcus Kane’s fiancée strode into the room, chic and lovely in an impeccable gray suit. 

Diana Sydney had had her eye on Marcus Kane since high school, and it was the triumph of her life that she’d finally gotten him.  She was a tall, distinguished-looking woman with a wardrobe of designer suits that always looked a bit out of place in a town like Arkadia, and especially at a place like Eden Tree Farm, where everyone wore boots and jeans.  Diana worked in commercial real estate, which meant she had very little business in her own hometown and spent the majority of her work week traveling all over the adjoining counties where suburban sprawl was beginning to creep towards the pristine little hamlet of Arkadia.  She’d brokered a massive deal for twelve strip malls a few weeks ago, a career high, and Marcus felt guilty that his congratulations were tinged with a faint hint of nostalgic sadness for all the small-town businesses that would soon be put out of work just so his fiancée could score a six-figure commission.

He was pretty sure he did not love Diana, but he liked her very much.  She was quick and clever and could be excellent company, and he found the presence of another human’s breath and heartbeat beside him at night immeasurably reassuring.  He was not alone if she was there.  Perhaps that was not much of a grand, glorious love story – perhaps his staff had failed to warm to her because they could sense that there were still pieces of himself that Marcus was holding in reserve from the woman he’d decided to marry – but after all, Callie had not been a fairy tale romance either.  She’d been his best friend, the only woman he’d ever imagined he would spend his life with, and even after fifteen years of marriage he was still as fond of her as he had been the day they met.  It wasn’t a raging inferno of passion, but Marcus suspected he simply wasn’t built that way.  And Diana, blissfully, did not expect that of him.  She had never asked him for any level of intimacy he did not feel comfortable offering her.  It wasn’t a perfect relationship – he wished she was a little more at ease around the farm staff, and she wished he would be more diligent about shaving, since she didn’t like him with a beard – but on the whole they managed very well.

Marcus rose to greet her, kissing her cheek. 

“Hello, Diana,” he said, rather formally, more politeness in his voice than genuine warmth; he found himself acutely aware of Indra’s keen gaze focused on the two of them, and felt awkward displaying any attention more overt than this in front of her.

“I’m so sorry,” Diana chirped, “did I interrupt?”

“Not at all,” said Indra evenly, the hint of frost in her tone so subtle that both Marcus and Diana chose to pretend they didn’t hear it.  “I was just leaving.”

“Nice to see you, Indra,” the other woman responded politely, which was clearly a dismissal.  So Indra rose from her seat to depart, but could not resist taking the opportunity for one last parting shot, in the hopes of knocking Diana off-balance and, if at all possible, ruining her day.

“Oh, by the way,” she remarked casually.  “Congratulations are in order for your firm, I believe.  I heard the Wallace house finally sold.”

Diana shook her head.  “No, the Wallace house is a rental,” she corrected the other woman rather coolly.  “It’s managed by a property company we work with, but it wasn’t up for sale.  It may have new tenants, but I haven’t heard anything about it.  That isn’t really my department.”

“Interesting,” said Indra, in a tone of voice which plainly conveyed that there were very few things on earth she would find less interesting than the intricacies of Diana Sydney’s professional life.  “I assumed you would have heard because of who the tenant is.”

Now she had their attention.

“Thelonious came by to pre-order his tree today,” she went on, as she made her way to the door, “and he told me to tell you that an old friend of yours is moving back to town.”

(That was not _precisely_ what Thelonious had said.  It was, in fact, close to the opposite.  His exact words had been, “For God’s sake don’t tell Diana Sydney while she’s anywhere near sharp objects or mechanical equipment.”)

“Really?” asked Marcus, brow furrowed, running down the list of fellow classmates Thelonious had kept in touch with, and trying to puzzle out which of them was the most likely to return home to the cozy small town most of them had fled from to make lives for themselves in the city.  “Did he say who?”

“Her name is Abby Griffin,” Indra tossed casually over her shoulder as she sailed out the door.  “She’s arriving this afternoon.”

She did not spoil her exit by lingering, though she did indulge in a brief moment to enjoy the mingled horror and rage that instantly contorted Diana Sydney’s elegant features, before closing the door and leaving them alone again.

The expression on Kane’s face, though – shock, followed by a kind of heavy sadness shadowing his warm brown eyes – took her a bit more by surprise, and as she walked away she found herself wondering what it could mean.

Diana waited until it seemed clear Indra was out of earshot before rounding on Marcus and glaring at him with her arms folded, leaving him on the receiving end of an angry woman’s scowl for the third time in less than an hour. 

If this was going to keep up, he would need a drink. 

And it was still only ten in the morning.

“Did you know?” Diana began without preamble, and he found himself immediately irritated.

“How would I possibly know, Diana?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Of _course_ I didn’t know.  You don’t think I’d have said something to you if I had?”

Diana gave him a long, searching look, lips tightly pinched in displeasure, and the intensity of her gaze left him feeling a trifle disconcerted, as though she were snooping through rooms that didn’t belong to her. It was silent for a long moment before she finally gave a curt nod, apparently satisfied that he was telling her the truth, and her tense posture relaxed a bit.

“I wonder what on earth she can be doing back in Arkadia after all this time,” she finally said, breaking the silence and dropping into the seat across the desk which Indra had recently vacated, crossing her perfect legs so the red soles of her pricey (and antique-hardwood-floor-destroying) Louboutin pumps were visible to him.  “You’d think after so many years in Boston, this town would feel too small for her.”

“She must be taking over the hospital administrator position.”

“Oh,” said Diana, surprised.  “Yes, you must be right.  Do you think that means she’s here to stay?  I mean for good?”

“I’d imagine so, yes,” Marcus agreed absently, returning to the stack of papers on his desk from which Octavia had first interrupted him.  “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“I’ve never liked that woman.”

“I know.”

“Jake was a different story, of course.”

“Of course,” Marcus murmured, feeling a cold little needle of grief pierce his chest and swallowing hard to repress it immediately.  “Everyone liked Jake.”

“You couldn’t help but like him, really,” mused Diana thoughtfully, as Marcus realized with some irritation that his fiancée was not about to let the topic go anytime soon, no matter how hard he pretended to be going over the receipts and ignoring her.  “He had a warmer energy.  Don’t you think?”

“Very much so.”

“And Abby isn’t warm at all.  I mean I’m sure she has many sterling qualities, but I wouldn’t call that one of them.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Marcus muttered noncommittally.

“Really clever people rarely are, I’ve found.  She’s certainly smart, she was always smart, but I never found her very easy to be around.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“How a man like Jake Griffin managed to stay married for so long to the most stubborn know-it-all in the entire town, I’m sure I don’t know.”

“They were in love,” said Marcus, a little too sharply, without looking up.  “We can’t help who we do or don’t fall in love with.”

There was something in his tone that Diana found she did not quite like, causing her to steer them into rather safer waters, but it left an unsettling sensation she could not shake.

“The daughter must be a teenager by now, right?  Or in college?”

“Twenty,” Marcus replied without thinking, “she’s the same age as Octavia.”

“I always forget what she’s called.  It was some kind of strange masculine name.  I don’t remember exactly.”

“Clarke.”

“Of course,” said Diana, watching him closely with narrowed eyes.  “Clarke.  That’s right.”  There was a frosty little pause before she added in an elaborately nonchalant voice, “You do seem rather up to date on the details of the Griffins’ lives for someone who claims not to care much about them either way.”

“The Jahas have stayed in touch with them,” said Marcus stiffly, not sure why Diana made him feel so defensive.  “Wells and Clarke were always close.  I pick things up when I’m over there for dinner.”  Diana didn’t answer.  “For God’s sake,” he sighed, a tiny bit more snappishly than he meant, “I’m not _withholding_ anything from you.  I didn’t find out she was moving back until you did.  Just now. From Indra.”

Diana gave him a long look.  “You and the Griffins used to be very close, once upon a time.  And Abby Griffin was quite good friends with . . . your wife, I recall.”  (Diana generally avoided saying Callie’s name out loud.)

Marcus looked away.  “That was a long time ago,” he muttered, busying himself with the paperwork on his desk.  “We were kids then.  People grow apart.”

“That’s true,” Diana allowed graciously, pleased by this answer and by the utter disinterest in his tone.

“This town’s small, but it’s not that small,” said Marcus flatly, without looking up.  “I don’t imagine we’ll see very much of Abby Griffin at all.”

“You’re right,” Diana agreed, fully reassured now, and reached out to pat him on the hand, admiring the glimmer of her engagement ring beneath the glow of his office lamp.  “I don’t imagine we will.”

* * *

 “No.”

“Mom, what is it?” her daughter yelled from inside the giant U-Haul trailer hitched to the back of their car, her voice muffled by boxes.

“No,” said Abby Griffin again, rubbing her eyes.  “No.  This cannot _possibly_ be happening.”

“I can’t hear you!  Yell louder!”

“Clarke, stop what you’re doing and get over here.”

“Hang on, I’m looking for the file with the rental paperwork in it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said her mother grimly, her tone finally getting her daughter’s attention.  There was a loud succession of thumping noises as Clarke climbed back over the wall of boxes to hop down from the trailer onto the snowy street, dusting off her hands as she made her way to the sidewalk where her mother stood gazing up with an expression of disbelief at the two-story brick townhouse that was meant to be their new home.

“Um,” said Clarke, temporarily at a loss for words as mother and daughter stood for a long moment in silence.

“CLOSED FOR REPAIRS,” announced the wholly unnecessary sign taped onto the front door, as though the Griffins couldn’t see the massive tree branch the size of a small car which had broken off under the weight of an unusually heavy snow and caved in a corner of the roof.

“Well, unless one of those eight thousand boxes marked ‘miscellaneous’ that came out of your room contains a spare roof, I’m not quite sure what to do here,” Abby said, pulling out her cell phone.  “Maybe the landlord has some answers.” 

The utter magnitude of her shock was so vast that she found herself remarkably calm.  She and her daughter had packed up their entire lives, sold their house in Boston, and driven all day through the snow, hauling a giant trailer behind them, to the town where she had grown up, and where a furnished rental house was waiting for them to move in at 4 pm today.  And here it was 4 pm on the dot, because the Griffin women were relentlessly punctual, they had more than held up their end of the bargain, and the deposit check had already cleared, but the house in front of them was very clearly unlivable.

 _I could so easily panic right now,_ Abby thought to herself, pressing the sensation downward.  _But I won’t.  Because we have to handle this.  I have to handle this.  I don’t have time to panic.  First things first.  Call the landlord._

But this turned out to be almost immediately unnecessary, as a small blue car sped around the corner and screeched to a halt in front of the house.  Abby paused mid-dial, attention caught by the sound, and turned to see a dark-haired, rosy-cheeked girl who could hardly be more than Clarke’s age leap out, leaving the motor still running.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!” she gasped, out of breath as though she’d run an entire mile to get to them, and a great deal of Abby’s irritation died down immediately now that there was someone there who needed mothering.

“Take a breath,” she advised wryly.  “It’s okay. We’re not going anywhere, as you can see.”

“My dad got stuck doing a repair job for one of his other properties that’s ten miles out of town and he didn’t realize how late it had gotten so he called me and I raced over here from choir practice just as fast as I could to tell you that the house –"

“ . . . has an oak tree sprouting from the attic,” said Abby.  “Yes, we caught that.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so –"

“It’s okay,” said Abby, patting the girl’s shoulder.  “Unless you actually struck the tree with lightning and split that branch off yourself, none of this is your fault.  I just wish someone had called me.”

“We did,” said the girl breathlessly, “like ten times, but your carrier must not get reception on this side of the mountains."

Abby looked at her cell phone more closely and realized the girl was right.  She'd had it in her purse in the backseat the whole drive from Boston, and she'd been too distracted by the roof damage to notice the "NO SIGNAL" warning as she had tried to dial.

"It's better on the other side of town," the girl said reassuringly, "it's just that the south side is mostly a dead spot."

“What’s your name?” Clarke asked her.

“Maya,” said the girl.  “Maya Vie.  My dad Vincent, he’s the property manager.  He says to tell you that they’re going to put a brand-new roof in for you, no charge, because the insurance will cover it, and they even have a crew willing to get to work on it right away.  Normally they’d wait to start until the temperatures were above freezing because it affects the equipment and the sealant and things like that, but Dad says they’re sure they can get you in by January 1st at the latest.  Maybe even earlier.”

Abby looked from the girl to the roof to the U-Haul and back again, struggling not to lose her temper at someone who, after all, hadn't done anything wrong.  “Maya, we’ve packed up our entire life,” she explained patiently.  “We don’t have a house in Boston anymore.  I start my new job on the 1st.  If we can’t move in for a month, we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh, but that's taken care of,” Maya reassured her hastily.  “Don’t worry.  The insurance covers that too.  We can book rooms for both of you.”

Abby froze.  “Book us rooms . . . here in town somewhere?”

“Of course.  To make sure you’re settled in time to start your new job.”

“Is there a new hotel in town, by any chance?” she asked, rather desperately.  “Hostel? Bed and breakfast? RV camp? Anything?”

“No, but don’t worry,” Maya said cheerfully, “the Eden Tree Lodge is absolutely beautiful.  And they have several rooms open, Dad called this morning to check and spoke to the manager himself, just to make sure.”

Clarke looked at her mother curiously, puzzled by the unreadable expression on Abby’s face.

“He talked to the manager,” Abby repeated numbly.  “The manager knows we’re coming.”

“Well, no, Dad didn’t give him any information yet, he just asked if there was a pair of adjoining rooms available.  He didn’t want to confirm anything until we’d spoken to you.”

“So he doesn’t know,” Abby said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes wearily as the two girls watched her in puzzlement.  “That might be worse, actually.  Or better.  Hard to say.”

“Mom?” Clarke asked, worried.  “You okay?”

“It’s fine,” said Abby briskly, shaking it off.  “The manager of the lodge is just . . . someone that I used to know.  That’s all.”

“Really?” Maya exclaimed.  “Did you know the Kanes before you moved?”

Abby nodded.  Clarke stared.

“ _Marcus_ Kane?” she asked.  “I remember that name.”

“Yes,” said Abby, carefully maintaining a neutral tone.  “His name is Marcus. We used to know him.  But I haven’t seen him in twenty years, except at weddings and funerals.  We don’t really talk.”

“Should be fun living in the same building for a whole month then,” said Clarke dryly.  “Don’t worry.  I’m good at awkward silences.”

“It will be fine,” said Abby firmly.  “I’m not worried about Marcus Kane right now, I’m worried about this trailer full of boxes, and what on earth we’re going to do with them.”

Maya brightened at this, realizing there was a problem she could actually help with, and was grateful for a subject change.  “We took care of that too!” she announced. “There’s a pair of movers coming in the next ten or fifteen minutes, and they’ll help you haul everything into the garage, which is all weatherproofed and everything, and then you can take just the boxes you need and head to the lodge and get checked in.  I’ll call Dad and let him know to go ahead and book the rooms.”

“Thank you,” said Clarke sincerely.  “You guys have seriously thought of everything.”

“I’m only sorry you won’t get to have a very Christmasy Christmas,” said Maya apologetically.  “You’d think, since it’s on a Christmas tree farm, that the lodge would be a little bit more festive, but Marcus doesn’t decorate or do any holiday stuff.”

“What are you talking about?” Abby asked in some surprise, “the Kanes _love_ Christmas.”

“Not Marcus, I guess,” said Maya.  “They haven’t had so much as a wreath on the door for years.”

“Wow,” said Abby.  “Things sure have changed around here.”

Clarke wanted to ask her more – there seemed to be something behind the story that her mother wasn’t telling her – but the movers arrived just then, and the next three hours were nothing but boxes, more boxes, a hasty dinner, and more boxes.  The Griffins didn’t get a moment alone with each other until they were on their way to the Lodge with a trunk full of suitcases.

“Is he nice?”

Abby was startled out of her silent contemplation of the snowy road in front of her, and turned to her daughter in the passenger seat.  “What?”

“Marcus Kane. Is he nice?”

Abby hesitated.  “No,” she finally said honestly.  “Not from what I remember.  Maybe he’s changed, but the last time I spent any time with him, he definitely wasn’t.”

“But he was your friend, once, wasn’t he?”

Abby shrugged, the pain she’d felt twenty years ago now dulled into a sturdy, impenetrable armor.  Nothing Marcus Kane did could hurt her, not now, after all this time.  “He was your father’s friend,” she amended mildly.  “Or, well, both I suppose, at one point, but really more his than mine.”

“What happened?”

“Sometimes people just grow apart, honey.”

“Mom.” Clarke’s voice was insistent.  She could always tell when there was something her mother wasn’t telling her. 

There was a faint pause before Abby, too exhausted from the insanity of the day, finally sighed and gave in, too tired to withstand Clarke’s continued pressure.

“He was your dad’s best man,” she said finally.  “Did you know that?” 

Clarke shook her head, puzzled.  “How come he’s not in the wedding photos?”

“Because he was drunk,” said Abby in a clipped voice.  “He and your dad had been really close friends all through high school and college, and his wife Callie was one of my best friends too.  Callie was my matron of honor, in fact.  They were married before we were.  He showed up at the church drunk, and in a foul mood.  Nobody knew why, not even Callie.  Lurching and stumbling and saying appalling things to everyone.  Thelonious managed to rein him in enough to get through the ceremony more or less intact, without embarrassing everyone, but at the reception he kept drinking.  Swiped a bottle of Scotch from the bar and just wandered off.  He missed his toast,” she said in a rather terse voice, and Clarke could tell she was trying very hard to tell the story without feeling any of the emotions behind it, the way she did sometimes when she had to talk about her husband’s death with strangers.  “I was pissed, mostly, but your dad was really hurt.  He and Thelonious finally found Marcus in the parking lot outside, and tried to call him a cab, and he said some things to both of them that were apparently too unpleasant to repeat; neither of them ever told me.  Jake thought Marcus had a drinking problem and wasn’t dealing with it very well, but Thelonious and I thought it was the opposite.”

“What do you mean, the opposite?”

“That he had a lot of other problems and when he wasn’t dealing with them very well, he drank.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Abby finally.  “Maybe it is.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

Abby shook her head.  “He came to your dad’s funeral,” she said.  “He didn’t say anything to me – hardly looked at me, in fact, he sat in the back with Callie and Thelonious – but he did come.  And I went to Callie’s funeral, and his mother’s.  But we barely spoke.”

“I wonder if he’s changed,” Clarke mused thoughtfully.  “That Maya girl seems to like him a lot.  And she probably wouldn’t if he was still a mean drunk.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Abby said, turning down the winding lane that led to Eden Tree Farm, gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly.  “We’re just guests renting a room, and he runs the whole place plus the farm on the other side of the property.  I don’t imagine we’ll see very much of Marcus Kane at all.”


	2. December 2nd

Clarke woke up to the smell of Christmas trees.

Her room was lovely, high-ceilinged and open but still cozy, its walls and floor built of lush golden-grained planks worn smooth as polished glass.  The huge picture window across from her bed, curtained in heavy snow-white cotton, looked out onto the back of the property where the grounds of the inn sloped downward into an ocean of green.  At the farthest end sat a merry red barn in the center of a huge paved lot where Clarke could see a bustling crowd of people and cars; the tree farm was open, and doing a brisk business.

Mom wasn’t awake yet (a lifetime in hospitals had taught her to seize the opportunity for extra sleep whenever she could get it, and they’d had an exhausting day yesterday on many fronts), so Clarke pulled on her jeans and sweater, laced up her boots, dug her warm coat and scarf out of the pile she’d dumped unceremoniously on her floor before bed, and made her way downstairs.  The dining room was full of breakfasting patrons, and the scent of pancakes was a powerful lure, but she didn't quite feel up to another run-in with Marcus Kane just yet after the disaster of their arrival; so she poured herself a huge cup of black coffee from the gorgeous silver coffee and tea station in the lobby, grabbed a chocolate chip cookie from the tray ( _Really? Not even gingerbread?_ , she thought, rolling her eyes somewhat.  _Maya wasn't kidding, he really is a Grinch_ ) and set out to explore the farm.

The trees were planted in tidy straight lines in order of age, so they began at the top of the hill at about the height of Clarke's knee, then increased in size as she walked, giving her the unsettling feeling of shrinking like Alice in Wonderland as a forest rose up around her, made even more magical by the scents of pine and coffee and the crunch of snow underneath her feet.  It was a walk of about fifteen minutes from the lodge down to the barn, and the overwhelming attachment Clarke had instantly felt towards Eden Tree Farm only heightened as she meandered lazily through the orderly rows of pine, ascending in height as she got closer to the lot.  By the time she hit the bottom of the slope and arrived at the chain-link gate, the trees were so tall that only the grandest living room would accommodate them, though clearly that wasn’t a dealbreaker here in Arkadia; even among the nine- and ten-foot rows she saw more than a few clean-cut stumps where a tree had already been claimed.

“You’re not supposed to come this way,” said a voice, startling her, and she turned to see a tall, freckled young man watching her enter through the gap in the fence.  “You have to check in with Octavia and get a number.”

“I’m not a customer,” said Clarke.  “I’m staying at the lodge.  I was just taking a morning walk.”

He stared blankly.  “At the lodge?” he repeated.  “Are you new? We were there for breakfast yesterday but you don't look familiar.  Did you check in last night?” Clarke nodded, and suddenly the man’s eyes lit up and he flashed her a crooked grin that seemed born for making trouble.  “You must be Abby Griffin’s daughter.”

Clarke stared, wondering if they’d met, struggling to place him.  “How do you know my mom?  You’re too young to remember her before she left, aren’t you?”

“Your mom?” came a sharp female voice over the tall young man’s shoulder and a petite girl about Clarke’s age bounced up beside him.  “Are you the new inn people?” She looked at the freckled young man, eyes sparkling inquisitively.  “Is this her?”

“I’m Clarke Griffin,” she said, still puzzled.  “Who are you? How do you know my mom?”

“We don’t,” said the girl, “but we’ve heard a lot about you.  We’re the Blakes.  I’m Octavia, this is Bellamy.  We help Indra over there” - gesturing to the woman hauling a fir tree over her shoulder to strap onto the roof of a customer’s car - “run the tree farm for Marcus.”

“We’ve never met your mom, but Thelonious told Indra and Indra told us."

"Word travels fast in small towns, apparently," Clarke observed, amused and alarmed that apparently her entire life story was known by strangers before she'd even finished her coffee on her first day in Arkadia.

“Anyone Diana Sydney hates is a friend of ours,” added Octavia, grinning at Clarke’s visible wincing.  “I take it they met,” she said dryly.

“Oh, Lord yes,” Clarke sighed.  “They certainly did.”

* * *

 

It had not been an auspicious beginning.

When she looked back on it later, after everything that happened, Clarke reflected that she should have seen the whole thing coming when she first walked into Eden Tree Lodge, arms laden with overnight bags and piles of clothes they’d dug out of the packing boxes in the shed.  It all should have been clear to her from the moment she looked up to see her mother, a few paces ahead of her, freeze in her tracks halfway to the wooden desk marked “RECEPTION,” staring at something on the other side of a doorway that Clarke couldn’t see.

Clarke set the heap of luggage down on a nearby wooden bench and walked up to join her, but Mom didn't even notice her.  She was rooted to the spot, staring through an open door with an “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign that led to a narrow hall with a handful of other doors, one of which was open and led to what was clearly the manager’s office.

With the manager still in it.

Clarke never forgot her first impression of Marcus Kane, forever linked as it was with the memory of her mother’s face as she stood watching him.  She'd seemed okay in the car, and Clarke hadn't been anticipating anything worse than a few moments of mild social awkwardness.  But Mom looked _stricken,_ like the past had all come rushing back to her in a flood as she stood there and stared, unseen, at her husband's best friend who she'd barely spoken to in twenty years.

 _Something here is very wrong,_ thought Clarke, with a little shiver of premonition.  The Griffin women did not keep secrets from each other, not ever, not about anything.  Which meant if there was more to Mom's feelings than Mom had told her, it was something Mom didn't even know she knew.

He was tall, she could tell even though he was seated, and bent over a desk.  Big and broad-shouldered with thick brown hair the same color as the glossy wood of the lodge’s walls and floors, and a dark beard peppered with white and gray.  He wore a blue and gray flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal the powerful arms of a man who’d grown up working the land, and even though at the moment he was sitting in front of a laptop in a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses, buried in what appeared to be a mountain of paperwork, Clarke felt she had never seen a man and a building appear so inextricably connected to each other as Eden Tree Lodge and Marcus Kane.  Rustic and spare and unfussy, though a little rumpled around the edges.  Warm.  Comfortable.  Pine and flannel and brown eyes and and the sound of a crackling fireplace and something elusive in the air that made her think of her father even though she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was.   _Home,_ she thought inexplicably, the word appearing in her mind out of nowhere, even though she had never seen this place before in her life, or even known it existed before today.  The house on the other side of town, with its shed full of boxes and its caved-in roof and its complete lack of cell phone service, evaporated from her memory, and from the moment she got her first real look at Eden Tree Lodge she never wanted to leave it.

“Hi!” she said, startling all three of them (herself included), and then everything changed.

Marcus Kane looked up from his work and saw Abby Griffin for the first time in more than twenty years.  He was startled to his feet by the sight of them and it took him a long, long moment to compose his face; uncertainty flashed in his eyes as he looked at Abby, followed by something dark and sad, as he turned his gaze and Clarke realized with a start that he wasn’t looking at her mother.  

He was looking at her.

“My God,” he murmured under his breath, voice low and full of emotion.  “You look just like him.”

Clarke felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and didn’t know what to say. Mom was frozen too, and offered no help; her jaw was set in that expression Clarke knew meant she was fighting back tears as well.  No one said anything, for far too long.  They just stood there miserably, the three of them, triangulated around the ghost of Jake Griffin, each thinking their own sad, private thoughts, looking from one to the other.  Clarke had only just begun to wonder if there was any possible way to recover from this opening or if they should just flee and sleep in the car, when the moment was both salvaged and destroyed at once by the unexpected appearance of a fourth person, breaking the walls of the triangle.

"Abby," came a sharp female voice as a figure rose from her seat in the corner of Marcus Kane's office and glided forth to greet them, revealing herself to be a tall, lovely blonde woman in a suit Clarke thought far too posh for a place like this, who leaned in to kiss Mom on both cheeks before taking Kane's arm in a way that could only be described as proprietary.  “My God, it’s been years.  You look terrific.”

“You remember Diana Sydney,” said Marcus rather gratefully, snapping out of his reverie and returning to the present.  “From Arkadia High.  My . . ."

The pause went on just a hair too long before Diana finished “... fiancee” for him, and extended her hand to shake Clarke’s.  “Very nice to meet you, Clarke. He’s right.  You look just like your father.”

But the words that had ached with loss and heartfelt emotion when Marcus Kane had uttered them, almost involuntarily, rang false in Diana’s cool, pleasant tone, and made everyone more uncomfortable than not.  Still, the ice had been broken, and they could proceed more normally from there.

“Darling,” said Diana, laying a hand on his arm, “the Griffins must be exhausted, they’ve been driving all day.  They probably want to check in.”

Marcus shook himself slightly and nodded abruptly.  “Yes,” he muttered, “of course,” and came around the desk to enter the lobby and take his place behind the reception desk.  Abby followed him.  There was a brief tussle over check-in - Marcus insisting that Vincent Vie had already settled the bill for her and Abby insisting that she was perfectly capable of paying for it herself, then Marcus handing her two room keys and Abby insisting she and Clarke would be fine sharing because they must be busy over the holidays, and Marcus rather stiffly insisting that there was plenty of room.  Clarke wandered away to examine the black and white photographs on the walls, framed in the same glossy dark wood as the walls.  Diana followed her.  

“That’s his mother,” she said, pointing to the kind-faced older woman.  “Vera.  She was the manager before.  They used to run the place together.”

“Family business,” said Clarke.  “That’s cool.  Have you lived here your whole life, Marcus?”

“Arkadia’s native son,” Abby answered for him.  “This tree farm is part of the fabric of this town.  It wouldn’t be Arkadia without a Kane behind this desk.”

She’d meant it to be kind, but Marcus stiffened visibly.  “Yes,” he agreed in a terse voice, “not all of us ran off to the big city the second they had the chance to escape.  Some of us stayed and made our lives here.”

Clarke looked at her mother, worried, afraid she would see a hurt look on Abby’s face, but instead, bizarrely, her mother appeared to have relaxed.  It was as though the blatant rudeness of the insult had swung the whole world back into focus and she’d found, finally, the man she had expected to find.  A man she didn’t like, had very little to say to, and with whom she was simply participating in an unwelcome but necessary business transaction.  

For a few moments, in the doorway, she’d felt something - Clarke was sure of it - and she was relieved, now, that she didn’t have to feel it anymore.  

 _False alarm,_ Clarke could feel her mother thinking as palpably as if the words were written in neon above her head.   _He’s still an asshole._

“Well, that’s what happens when you grow up in a town without a medical school,” she said easily.    “Sooner or later you have to run away from home.  You should try it sometime.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.  Just that you haven’t changed a bit.”

“He’s changed more than you give him credit for,” said Diana a little defensively.  “He’s planning on selling the land, in fact.  We’re thinking of moving to L.A.”

This got Abby’s attention, all digs forgotten. _“What?”_ she exclaimed.  “You’re going to sell Eden Tree Farm?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Marcus grumbled, glowering from one woman to the other as though he couldn’t decide which of the two he was most irritated at - Abby, for so blatantly judging him, or Diana for bringing it up.  “I’m considering it.”

“ _We’re_ considering it,” Diana amended, a trifle possessively.  “Since we’re getting married, it’s a decision we’ll be making together, of course.”

“Isn’t it his land?” Clarke asked before she could stop herself, and Diana’s friendly smile evaporated.

“Of course,” she said rather snappishly, “but once we’re married it will be ours together and we need to do what’s best for both of us.”

“I can’t imagine Marcus Kane in L.A.,” said Abby.  “Good God.  What would you do there?  You’d be bored out of your mind.  You’d hate it.  You didn’t even like New York when we went there for five days on our eighth grade field trip.  You thought there were too many people.”

“There _were_ too many people.”

“How’s L.A. an improvement over Manhattan, then?  It’s the same number of people, plus all their cars.”

“Yes, but I’d never have to look at another damn Fraser fir as long as I live.”

“You’d  miss it.”

“Not a chance.”

“I can’t imagine you growing palm trees.  Or avocados.  Vera Kane would roll over in her grave.”

Diana stiffened, as though bracing for Marcus to take offense at Abby’s casual mention of his mother, but he didn't even blink.  

“I think if she were here she’d tell me I’m doing a poor enough job running her business that I might as well pack it in altogether,” said Marcus, and even though his tone was sarcastic there was a sting of bitter self-recrimination inside it that made everyone uncomfortable.  

“I think it’s really nice,” said Clarke helpfully.  “Though I see you don’t have your Christmas decorations up yet.  Do you need help with that?”

“No,” Kane said with great force.

“You sure? We’re here all month anyway, and we’ll be bored out of our minds.”

Diana’s face went white. “A _month?”_ she repeated, staring wildly from Kane to Abby and back again.  “A month . . . _here_?  At the inn?”

“Why?” asked Abby.  “Is that a problem?  We were told there was plenty of room.”

“That’s just . . . a very long time to be living out of boxes,” the other woman finally managed, convincing no one.  Marcus seemed confused, Abby irritated, and Clarke both defensive on her mother’s behalf - really, how insecure was this woman that she couldn’t handle her boyfriend’s inn having female guests? - and amused at how easy it was to provoke her.

“Oh, we don’t mind,” Clarke said breezily.  “It’s a big repair job, and it takes longer in the winter, Maya said.  Freezing temperatures affect the equipment.  And Vincent is paying for it, because their insurance covers the damage and all the expenses.  So we told him to take his time, you know, however long it takes to do it right.  We can handle a month or two of living out of suitcases, can’t we, Mom?”

“A month or _two_?”  Now Diana was positively green around the gills.  Abby raised her eyebrow at her daughter as if to say _Please don’t give the lady a heart attack on my behalf,_ so Clarke didn’t push her luck any further.

“Well,” said Marcus, not looking at anyone, “hopefully if we’re lucky it won’t take nearly that long.”

Then he handed Abby a pair of keys, curtly informed her that breakfast was served between seven and nine, returned to his office (Diana following behind), and closed the door with something that was just barely not a slam.

They had not seen him again.

* * *

 Clarke relayed the bare bones of this to Bellamy and Octavia, adding in a brief sketch of her conversation with Mom in the car about Marcus getting drunk at the wedding, an anecdote which astonished the Blakes.

“You don’t understand,” said Bellamy.  “I’ve never seen him drunk once.  I’ve never seen him have more than like two beers at a staff barbecue.  This doesn’t sound like him at all.”

“Well, it’s what happened.”

“I hope you do end up staying for two months,” said Octavia frankly.  “Anything to annoy Diana Sydney.  And maybe drive her away if we can.”

“What’s her deal?”

“None of us like her.  Not just because she’s terrible for Marcus -”

“- though she absolutely _is_ terrible for Marcus -”

“- but because he would never even be _considering_ selling the land if it weren’t for her.”

“That came up yesterday,” Clarke informed them.  “Diana wants them to move to L.A.”  The Blakes both shuddered.  “Well, look,” said Clarke reasonably, “if he wants to sell it he should be able to sell it. Let someone else with dreams of running a small-town inn come in and take it over.  There must be someone in this town who would jump at the chance to sell Christmas trees for a living.”

The Blakes looked at each other.  “Diana doesn’t want to sell the farm and the lodge,” said Octavia finally.  "She wants to sell the land.  The other end of the farm comes right to the Arkadia city limits, and the county wants to put a freeway in.  Which would make this land ripe for real estate developers to come in and raze the whole thing to the ground, for condos or strip malls or something."

"What?"  Clarke was aghast.  "We cannot let Diana turn this farm into a strip mall."

Bellamy opened his hands in a gesture of surrender.  "Hey, we're with you," he said.  "Any ideas you got, we're happy to consider.  We're at our wits' end over here.  Everyone's contracts run out on December 31st and nobody knows if they'll still have jobs after that."

"I'm here for a month, with nothing to do," said Clarke.  "And I can't sit in a hotel room all day.  Even a very nice one.  I'll go crazy if I don't have a project.  I'm in for whatever you need."

"You want a job?" asked Bellamy.  "It's not glamorous work, I know you were in art school or whatever, but if you're around through the holidays anyway and you want something to do . . ."

"Oh my God, please say yes," said Octavia, "he needs a partner to help him manage the delinquents so bad."

"The who?"

"Come meet Indra," said Bellamy. "I'll explain on the way.  You're saying yes, right?"

"I'm saying yes."

"It doesn't pay much."

"I don't need much.  I just need something to do all day long besides watch Marcus Kane and my mom awkwardly avoid each other."

"Great," said Octavia, "then it's settled.  You're hired.  You'll co-manage the kids, and in between, we're going to figure out a way to keep Eden Tree Farm once and for all, and get rid of Diana while we're at it."

"I don't suppose we can just like . . . make Kane fall in love with your mom," said Bellamy dejectedly.  "It would be so convenient."

"Unlikely," said Clarke with a laugh as they made their way towards the barn.  "You should have seen them last night.  I'll be surprised if they can even stand to be in the same room with each other.  It's gonna be a _long_ month."

* * *

Clarke had no idea that, back up at the inn, Marcus Kane was thinking the exact same thing.

 _It's gonna be a long month,_ he muttered irritably to himself as he carried out a fresh pot of coffee for the dining room sideboard and watched Abby Griffin make effortless conversation with their only other long-term guests for the season, a pair of Indra's nieces named Niylah and Luna.  At the moment, she was buttering a scone and being funny about the various travails of their road trip from Boston, and the girls were laughing, and he was irritated afresh every time she mentioned living in the city.  _Well, sorry we don't have Korean barbecue or five-hundred-dollar hair salons here,_ he thought to himself.  _Sorry this is just the place you were born where we only have one barber and the most exotic food is pizza, but everyone actually knows each other and people actually care about the town.  Sorry we're not cool enough for you._

This was the root of his most regular and consistent argument with Diana, and which he'd not been at all pleased to have her bring up again so casually last night for Abby Griffin to unerringly put her finger on.  Marcus did not, in fact, want to move to Los Angeles.  California he was fine with.  Warm weather sounded nice.  It would be strange learning to live someplace that didn't have four distinct seasons, but up north, in the redwoods, you got fog and chilly autumn mornings and things were green and towns were smaller, and that California sounded perfectly manageable.  But he would never be a beach person or a downtown person or a condo person, and most crucially, he would never be a city person, and that was the piece Diana struggled to grasp.  Because Diana was a city person, and he knew as well as she did that there was a career ceiling for her here in Arkadia and eventually she would leave to go someplace else where she could do the work she wanted, and Marcus would have to either move with her or break up and stay here alone.  And Eden Tree Farm was a two-person job, at minimum; it had been best with three, when Callie and Vera had both been here, but managing it himself with no company but their ghosts was a wearing business that made even Los Angeles, at times, seem tempting.

The problem was that he did not know what he wanted.  And Diana did know what she wanted, and most of the time it seemed easier to just believe that what he wanted and what she wanted were the same, because often they were, and because that saved him from being forced to ask himself some questions he'd decided on the whole it was easier to leave unanswered.

She'd been more amorous than usual last night, which was unlike her, and which ordinarily would have been a pleasant surprise but which for some reason he couldn't sort out had been met with more confused emotions than usual.  She rarely slept over at his apartment, preferring her own sleek chrome-and-glass condo on the far end of Arkadia, in the town's one newly-built housing development.  Marcus' apartment on the top floor of the inn was a bit too rustic for her; the HVAC system didn't reach up there all the way, so he heated it with the same old iron woodstove his grandparents had used when they lived here, and most of the furniture was what Diana politely referred to as "quaint," from the four-poster bed his great-grandfather had carved to the big leather armchairs worn buttery-soft with age where he used to read by the fire with his mother.  Diana claimed she never slept well in the inn - too much noise from the guests below, from the crackle of the old woodstove, the creak of the floors, the wind whistling at the rickety single-paned windows which were cold to the touch all winter long.  And she liked her own expensive memory foam mattress better than Marcus' far more ancient one, with its telltale squeaks every time either of them rolled over.  She did not like to make love in his bed.

But she had last night, and Marcus had been surprised to find himself, if not resistant, or even ambivalent, at the very least a trifle more uncomfortable about it than he ordinarily was.  Diana had been there when he checked the Griffins in, after all, so she knew as well as he did that Abby was in the room directly below Kane's apartment.  The first and second floors were full, the third completely empty, and Vincent Vie had paid for the two corner suites.  He had put Clarke on the north end, divining with the unerring instincts of a man who'd run an inn since he was twenty that she would want the view of the trees, and put Abby on the south end, down the hall, on the assumption that she would rather have the one with the bathtub.  He'd been right on both counts, because he was very good at his job, and they'd both found their accommodations unexpectedly perfect; but it meant that he'd been unable to avoid the knowledge that her bedroom was situated directly below his.  And since Diana knew it too - and since the creaks and squeaks of the mattress had been a deterrent to lovemaking dozens of times in the past - he was more than a little surprised when she followed him upstairs after he finished the accounts and told him to unzip her dress.

It wasn't bad, with Diana.  It was never bad.  She was a bolder and more confident person than Callie had been, and that carried over in bed; with Callie there had been sweetness, intimacy, decades of affection, and the part of Marcus that might once have yearned for something more raw, more passionate had long since gone quiet by the time Diana arrived.  And so if, with her, the sweetness was gone, perhaps that was the tradeoff for finally experiencing the heat of being wanted by someone very, very badly.  He'd ceased to believe it would be possible to have both, so he taught himself to stop missing the feeling of Callie curling up trustingly against his chest to fall asleep in his arms (Diana preferred to get dressed afterwards, and drive home to her own bed). 

So it had been good - not great, not amazing, but definitely good, and more affectionate than usual, and after awhile he managed to push out of his mind the picture of Abby Griffin lying in her bed directly below, listening to every creak of the mattress or thump of the bedposts against the wall and knowing exactly what they meant.

But it had been easier to push that awareness out of his mind last night, while it was happening.  Much harder in the cold clear light of day, as she held out her coffee cup for a refill and looked at him with something in her eyes that seemed to mingle amusement with patronizing disdain.  She had never liked Diana Sydney, dating back to their particularly brutal runoff election for sixth grade class president, and Marcus knew that he'd diminished somewhat in her esteem from the moment Diana had announced to Abby last night that they were engaged.

But they _were_ engaged, and he'd been perfectly fine with it before Abby showed up, and there was no reason for him to feel differently about it now than he did twenty-four hours ago, so he was profoundly irritated at himself that her arrival had changed anything whatsoever.  But it had.  Why should he be embarrassed about it, if Abby had overheard him in bed with his fiancee?  So what?  It wasn't like they were teenagers anymore, they were halfway through their forties for God's sake, there was no reason for him to feel awkward or for that awkwardness to make him defensive, except that it was somehow all tied up with the way she talked so airily about the big-city amenities she missed and the fact that he'd had to make budget cuts in the kitchen staff which left him helping out with the breakfast service himself and couldn't avoid having to wait on her and the way she'd always been the first one with her hand up every time the teacher asked a question in every class from kindergarten through senior year.

Superior.  That's what she was.  Or what she thought she was, anyway.  She might look at him with something that felt like condescension, for the fact that he'd never left the town - or even the house - where he was born, but _she_ was the one who hadn't changed at all.

The girl, he didn't think he minded so much, despite how alarmingly she resembled Jake.  But a whole month of Abby Griffin underfoot was going to kill him.

Maybe if he bribed Vincent Vie he could speed the roof repair process along.  Maybe Diana could find them a house.  Maybe she'd hate it here and move back to Boston.

Yes, that was it.  Of course, that was it.  Abby wasn't built for a place like this, any more than Diana was.  She'd leave on her own soon enough.  He just had to give her a push.  Then, once she was gone, everything would go back to normal.  Once she was gone he'd get her out from beneath his skin. 

He'd spent twenty years forgetting Abby Griffin existed; he could certainly do it again.

He just couldn't do it with her sitting in front of him.


	3. December 3rd

She was only four minutes early to the meeting, which to Diana Sydney counted as being late. 

Ten was her minimum, but fifteen was better.  More than fifteen and you became an inconvenience; people always felt obligated to hurry through whatever they were doing to accommodate you, so by the time the meeting actually began they already felt rushed and annoyed.  Less than ten, and inevitably the person waiting for you would experience at least one moment of subconscious questioning _(Are they really coming? What if they don’t come?)_ and the anxiety followed by relief when you finally arrived could make introductions awkward.  No, ten to fifteen minutes was the ideal window, perfectly calibrated to ensure that every time Diana showed up for a meeting she was received on the best terms possible.  Little things made all the difference.  This was one of the many tricks that made her so good at commercial real estate, a job which so often required explaining to clients that what they actually wanted didn't exist and convincing them to buy something else instead.  She’d never been a woman who could effortlessly get people to like her, she had to _work_ for it, but over the years she’d developed a set of learned behaviors that smoothed over the harsh edges as much as possible to create something that, if it wasn’t quite natural charisma, was at least a carefully-calculated sort of charm.

But this morning she’d almost blown it, she’d missed her own window and arrived to find everyone already seated in the conference room, forcing her to make a more conspicuous entrance than she liked and appear actually late even though she wasn't, and she was irritated at Abby Griffin even though rationally she understood that it was hardly _directly_ the other woman’s fault.

It would all have been so much easier if she’d slept at her own apartment last night, like usual, and she still wasn’t entirely sure why she hadn’t.  Marcus’ mattress was horrible.  The whole apartment, really, was a disaster - Vera’s taste was nothing like her own – and Diana’s only comfort was that it would be far easier to persuade him to get their own place once they were married.  (In L.A., if all went well.  Someplace modern and open and airy, big sunny windows and clean white walls and furnishings actually made in this century which she wouldn’t be embarrassed for friends to see.)  Diana hated spending the night at the inn.  How vast it was, this piece of Marcus’ emotional landscape that would never include her.  Every square inch of it, from the lodge to the woods, belonged to him in a way that would always be his alone.  If she married him and they stayed in Arkadia, he'd never leave this place and she would simply be . . . absorbed into it.  But she would never _live_ here, she would never have a share in this piece of Kane family history.  She would always be a guest.

But while sleeping over in Marcus’ dark, cluttered apartment gave her no pleasure, and would throw off the whole rhythm of her morning, he’d been up working on the accounts until nearly midnight – far too late to coax him into driving across town to join her on her far superior mattress.  Not to mention that she wasn’t quite ready to tell him the truth yet if he’d happened to ask her who her 8 a.m. meeting was with; spending his whole day immersed in the inn’s financially precarious state always made him anxious and sensitive.  So while tonight was not the right moment, perhaps, to bring up her plan to rescue him from all of this, it did suddenly feel like a good time to remind him that she was the partner he could rely on, the person he would be spending the rest of his life with.

(Why did she feel like that was something he suddenly needed reminding of?)

Ridiculous, for a person like herself to be jealous of a person like Abby Griffin.  _Still,_ after all these years.  They weren’t in school anymore, for God’s sake.  But from the moment the other woman had walked in the door her presence had somehow expanded to fill the entire space, as though she had permeated the very air moving through the rooms.  She’d just . . . taken it over.  As she always had.  As she’d done with everything that mattered to Diana, since middle school.  Abby’s presence in the suite upstairs _itched_ at her, a palpably physical sensation that left her on edge with a jittery irritation she couldn’t quell. 

Marcus seemed immune, she noted with a relief she didn't want to examine too closely, as she sat in the faded old armchair beside his desk, tapping away at her iPhone and watching him work.  He’d closed his laptop and was working in the battered old leather accounts book Vera had used, and which despite every protest from Diana he refused to get rid of.  (He used Quickbooks too, he wasn’t a Luddite; but he did everything by hand first and then transferred it into the system, claiming he could only think onto paper and not a screen, something Diana found insane.)  With the computer put away, the only light in the room came from the old brass lamp on his desk she’d tried half a dozen times to get him to replace in favor of something less clunky with higher wattage that wouldn’t strain his eyes so much.  But the lamp had been his grandfather’s, so Diana didn’t have a chance.  

If Clarke, the artist, had been there, she’d have said Marcus looked like a Rembrandt – a solitary man reading an old leather book, alone in a pool of dim amber light which set his rich mahogany hair aglow with flickers of bronze and gold, snow falling in the windowpane behind him. 

If Abby, the widow, had been there, she’d have seen something else - that inside Marcus’ expression of thoughtful concentration lurked a hidden sadness, something connected to the way he caught himself from time to time idly turning the pages back to the entries for past years, where profits and losses were tallied in very different handwriting. 

But no one was there except Diana, who thought only of her continual distaste that none of the upholstery matched, and how soon she could convince him to come upstairs to bed.

She hadn’t packed her nightclothes or toothbrush, though she’d had a drawer of her own in the upstairs dresser since they’d begun sleeping together which contained the bare essentials, so she knew it had taken him by surprise that she’d decided to stay instead of going home.  But there was something in the knowledge that Abby was sleeping just downstairs that made her feel curiously reluctant to leave Marcus unsupervised.  Though he’d seemed impervious, working for several hours in total silence after the Griffins had gone up to their rooms; the prickly irritation she couldn’t shake didn’t seem to affect him a bit, which was a relief. 

Abby was no threat to her upcoming marriage, Diana was sure of it, but she might well be a threat to the larger plan; she had a way of casually ruining things that Diana had never quite gotten over, and on the whole it was better to be safe than sorry.

So she’d spent the night.  And even though it was borderline impossible for her to find anything sexy about the environment of Marcus’ mother’s drab old apartment, and she was working without her far better-outfitted bedroom or even any decent lingerie, she made do, and they both fell asleep satisfied.  She slept a few hours and rose early, dressed in the dark, and crept out silently before he woke, like a guilty one-night stand instead of his fiancée, to avoid questions about where she was going.  Then she drove home to shower and change before her meeting at Frost & Sons, to which she’d made it only just in time.

The “and Sons” was a bit of a misnomer, since there was just the one, seated in the conference room next to his mother, but it looked better on signs than "and Son."  Both Frost and Son and the dark-haired young woman sitting beside them rose to their feet as Diana pushed open the glass doors.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said with as much charm as she could possibly muster, extending her hand to the older woman first, as was proper (it was still her company, after all, she'd announced her retirement but hadn't actually set a date yet) before greeting the other two and taking her seat.

“Not at all,” said Nia Frost agreeably, “you’re right on time,” though there was a flicker of something in her tone of voice that indicated to Diana that this was at least partially a lie.  Diana suspected the other woman held the same punctuality standards she did.  This was not an auspicious beginning.

“You had kind of a drive,” offered her son Roan, taking his seat again and reclining back to drape his arm over the back of it.  Roan was less chilly than his mother, though his casual air didn't fool Diana; he was sharp as a knife, and she could sense him watching her appraisingly.  “Arkadia’s, what, hour? Hour and a half?”

“Closer to two today, with snow on the roads."

“Well, we appreciate you making the trip,” said Nia graciously.  “Ontari will bring you some coffee if you’d like.”

“Lovely, thank you,” said Diana, as the pretty young woman beside Nia rose obediently to her feet and moved over to the chrome-and-glass sideboard where a sleek white ceramic coffee service stood waiting.  Nia rather liked to play off the family name, so everything in Frost & Sons was white or chrome or glass.  It might have come off as an affectation in the hands of someone less imposing, but Nia Frost was a woman you couldn’t help but take seriously.

Ontari served them all coffee, polite to both Diana and Roan but deferential to the point of subservience to her boss.  Diana had met the girl a few times before and Ontari’s bearing had always struck her as less like a personal assistant and more like a religious acolyte.  Nia inspired that in people.

And right now, she was holding Diana Sydney’s entire career in her hands.

Roan spoke first. “So where are we at?” he asked in a tone that wasn’t quite a demand and wasn’t quite bored, but contained mild notes of both.  “He signed the papers yet?”

“I haven’t had the opportunity to bring it up yet,” said Diana, carefully keeping the defensiveness out of her voice.  “This has to be handled delicately.”

“The L.A. office is scheduled to open on March first,” Nia reminded her gently.  “We’ll need staff in place by the end of January.  You do still want the job, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then we really must come to an arrangement about the farm.”

“The New York guys are getting antsy,” Roan chimed in.  “They wanna break ground as soon as shit thaws.”

Nia flashed her son a single raised eyebrow which appeared to rebuke him for defiling her pristine conference room with casual profanity; but Roan, who was used to it, didn’t flinch.

“We’ve assured them that the deal is in motion,” said Nia, “as you encouraged us to do.  Obviously if something goes wrong at this stage, it will reflect poorly on Frost & Sons, and we have a long, productive relationship with this hotel chain, which we would like to maintain.”

“He’ll sell,” said Diana confidently.  “I just need a bit more time.”

“He’d better,” Roan told her.  “Not just for us, for him.  This thing’s gotta be a millstone around his neck.  We ran a credit report.  Without a major change, he’s got maybe another two years before he goes under.  And he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who makes major changes easily.”

“No,” Diana agreed, “he isn’t.”

“I like Kane,” he added frankly.  “Always have.  I don’t want to have to screw him over if I don’t have to.  But this hotel’s getting built, Diana.  Either we do it the nice way, where you’ll be cruising down Sunset Boulevard in a red convertible within three months, or we do it the not-so-nice way, which involves a couple phone calls to Kane’s bank that won’t be pleasant.  Make this easy on us.”

“Believe me,” said Diana, “we have the same goal.  And I usually get what I want.”

“You do indeed,” said Nia with a hint of a smile.  “It’s why I’ve always enjoyed working with you.  You’re excellent at your job, Diana.  We’ve had our eye on you for years.  You’re far too capable to be stuck in a small-town firm for the rest of your life.  This could be your legacy.  A massive hotel and resort right on the edge of the Arkadia city limits that will push the mayor to finally approve the freeway construction project.  You could turn the whole town around.  You could change Arkadia forever.  All you have to do is persuade your own fiancé to sign a piece of paper that will make him exceedingly rich.  I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long already, quite frankly; you don’t usually work quite so down to the wire.”

“I'll have it settled by Christmas,” said Diana with more confidence than she felt.  “That’s a promise.  You can tell the hotel people that.  It’s as good as done.”

“It’ll be done when I have that signed paperwork in my hand,” said Nia.  “If you want this job in L.A., you have to prove to us that you can land us this deal.  And the window is closing.”

Those were the words that haunted Diana, ringing in her head over and over as she drove the seventy miles back from Azgeda to Arkadia. 

_The window is closing._

_The window is closing._

Why did they feel so charged with portent?  Why did it feel as though Nia were trying to tell her something about her entire life?  Why did everything, suddenly – Los Angeles, her job, Marcus – feel like she was caught in a race against time?

But she could do this.  She could close this deal.  She knew she could.

Vera Kane had been a naïve, sentimental old woman, with no idea what kind of asset she’d really had; but her son, though more sentimental than Diana would have liked, was not naïve.  No one would ever have been able to get Vera to sell her family estate to a billionaire New York hotelier to knock down the farm and lodge and turn the entire property into a massive destination resort complex that would singlehandedly revitalize Arkadia into a tourist destination.  But Marcus, she thought, could be persuaded.  He felt the same disgust about the proposed freeway construction through town as everyone else in Arkadia did, and he’d probably see the resort as garish; but she wouldn’t have to tell him all of that.  Not at first.  She could just tell him that Frost & Sons had a buyer, present it to him as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had dropped suddenly into their laps, apply a little pressure, and then it would be done.  He would see reason, she knew he would.  After all, what could possibly be keeping him in Arkadia?

If Diana was set on moving to Los Angeles, there was no one left here for him to stay for.

No, Marcus would come with her.  Marcus would say yes.  She was sure of it.

. . . Almost.


	4. December 7th

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I'm back! I know it's been like a YEAR. I'm going to try to get this finished by Christmas, though! Thanks for being patient and putting up with me!

Clarke Griffin was her father’s daughter, with her father’s irresistible and tenacious charm, which meant it had taken her less than a day to find herself co-managing the tree lot kids with Bellamy Blake and befriending every employee in the process.  Abby was relieved to see this – she’d worried, a bit, that the town would be too small for her ambitious, world-traveling daughter – but in the short-term she couldn’t help envying Clarke's effortless social ease, or how quickly the girl had found seemingly infinite ways to fill her time.

They’d allotted themselves a month in the new house before Abby’s job started, under the expectation that it would take them at least that long to settle in.  As she packed up her old house, Abby had worried periodically that even a month might be insufficient; moving was such an endless sea of hassles, so much to do, so much to buy, so many boxes to put away, so much furniture to reassemble, so many things you think you’ve crossed off the list and then you remember you’ve forgotten laundry detergent or lightbulbs or shampoo, so back to the store you go, sometimes three or four times in one day.  And the nearest Target was a three-hour drive from here, so hunting down anything she couldn’t obtain on Arkadia’s tiny, quaint Main Street would be an all-day errand. And they’d wanted to be as settled as possible by Christmas.  "I don't want to be stuck stringing lights around a stack of moving boxes," Clarke had said.  "At least the downstairs has to be livable by then."

So they’d left themselves a full month to make sure they had plenty of time; only now they were living in a hotel, with their boxes and furniture in storage, which meant Abby had a completely blank calendar and absolutely nothing to do.

She’d tried twice already to go down to the hospital and offer her services, and been politely turned away.  They couldn't pay her until her contract actually began in January, she was told.  When she offered, voice tinged with the urgency  of the desperately-bored, to volunteer her services free of charge, just to get started early, she learned that the present hospital administrator she'd be replacing was up to his eyeballs preparing for his retirement, and the dates he'd scheduled for her training were the earliest time he had available. He didn't turn her away at the door, he invited her in and asked her to take a seat on his sofa and told her he'd be with her in a moment; but after fifteen full minutes of watching him answer ringing phones and page through files an endless line of assistants were carrying in and out, with barely a moment to spare to answer her inquiries which he was politely attempting to tolerate, it became abundantly clear to Abby that she was only in everybody's way.

Next she'd tried making her way around the hospital, hoping for the chance at least to meet and get to know some of her staff and get the lay of the land, but was surprised to find how quiet it was.  Her new assistant Dr. Jackson, one of the few surgeons who was on duty that day, found the whole process endlessly amusing.  "Are you just wandering around trying to get into a pickup surgery?"

"I'm living in a hotel.  I'm going to go crazy with nothing to do for the next month."

"Well, you won't find it here.  Not in December.  Things are usually really slow around this time."

“Slow? Really?” She gave him a look, arms folded, eyebrow raised.  “Because I just came from the administrator’s office and he’s moving so fast he’s a blur.  He hardly set down the telephone receiver the whole time I was there.”

“Well, yeah.  He’s worked here fifty years and he’s got ten days to close everything out before he and his wife go on Christmas vacation.  Lots of paperwork."

"He's taking a vacation right before he retires?"

"Things move a little differently here than you're used to in Boston, Dr. Griffin."

"So it seems."

"You'll find most of the staff gets to take it pretty easy over the holidays. Light shifts, very few emergencies.  If it’s a particularly action-packed Christmas season, we might have two babies and a round of flu. Sometimes we get a kid down from Eden Tree Farm who got stupid with a hacksaw when Indra wasn’t looking.  Bumps and bruises from falls on the ice. Things like that. But you’re not in the big city anymore, Doc. We haven’t had so much as an emergency C-section in at least eight years.” He grinned at her. “It’s a low-drama job,” he cautioned her.  “I hope that’s what you wanted.”

And it _had_ been what Abby wanted.  It had been what she wanted when she took the job, and it had been what she wanted when she sold the house in Boston, and it had been what she wanted when she and Clarke packed up all their possessions into approximately one hundred thousand cardboard boxes, loaded them into a U-Haul, and drove across the town border to return home to Arkadia for good, and it had been what she wanted right up until the moment she realized she was going to be stuck for four full weeks under the same roof as Marcus Kane with no work or projects or distractions, at which point she would have given every dollar in her bank account for a nice subway collision.  

Or an e. coli outbreak.  

Or a serial killer.  

Anything to keep her out of that damned inn, and keep Marcus Kane out of her head.

But annoyingly, Arkadia was as sleepy and idyllic as she and Jake had left it, with zero serial killers to distract her.  So no boxes to unpack or bookshelves to assemble, no surgeries or staff orientation.  She'd even have been happy to have some HR paperwork to fill out, but no such luck.  The few visits she had to pay around town took less than a day; they had dinner with the Jahas once, and met with Vincent Vie to go over some insurance forms, but that filled up the social calendar as much as could be reasonably be expected.

Clarke, however, had fallen rapidly into a very busy routine; Abby saw her at breakfast and dinner, but that was it.  She'd taken to spending the bulk of her day down the hill at the tree lot, where there were so many other people her age.  At night, the kids all congregated at El Sombrero on Main Street, where the $5 margarita pitchers, unlimited chips and salsa, and inexplicable heavy metal soundtrack were unchanged from Abby’s own youth.  (She wondered if Marcus ever joined the kids there; once upon a time he'd been better at nailing the bulls-eye on their Corona-branded dartboard than anyone in town except Jake.)  Clarke always invited her, but Abby never went; she had no interest in being the mom crashing the kids' party, of doing tequila shots with people half her age and trying to be "cool."  Still, she found herself in the rather amusing position of being just a little bit envious of her more extroverted child, who made friends instantly wherever she went.  Abby had hardly had such luck herself with Diana or Marcus, and time did not seem to be improving the situation much at all. 

If Marcus had thawed towards her at all, it was imperceptible; at this rate, perhaps in a hundred and seventy years, he might say good morning to her in the hallway and mean it, but until then, it was very much Clarke who was having all the fun.

* * *

By the end of the first week, Abby had unpacked everything that could conceivably be unpacked (which wasn't much), run every errand that could be run, visited everyone who could be visited, and seen everything that could be seen, so she set out to accomplish the one thing which she had not quite yet been able to drum up the courage to do: namely, explore the inn itself.

Abby had grown up with Marcus, and Arkadia was a tiny place. It was a given that, by the end of high school, every kid in town had visited the house of every other kid in town, probably more than once. For birthday parties, for group math projects, for Sunday dinners with your parents, for trick-or-treat.  So Abby was no stranger to Eden Tree Lodge.  She'd always liked Vera Kane, and her parents had bought Christmas trees from her every year for as long as Abby could remember.  They'd come to the lodge to eat sometimes too, for special occasions - Easter brunches and birthday dinners and big Fourth of July cookouts on the rolling lawn. Once, she'd considered it a place she knew well.

But it was different now, under its new master's hand.  Abby could not tell whether it was simply that it disoriented her to see the place so barren of its rather legendary holiday cheer, or whether it had more to do with the presence of the building's very particular ghosts, but something about it felt . . . _wrong._

Thoughts of Callie were, and had always been, very nearly as painful as thoughts of Jake, so Abby had developed careful disciplines to avoid them.  But it was impossible to do that here.  Eden Tree Lodge had been Callie's home, and filling it with love and warmth and happy guests had brought her tremendous joy for the duration of her too-short life.

First his mother, then Jake, then the only woman he’d ever loved.  So many losses, in such a short time.  If she’d liked him more, Abby would have felt desperately sorry for Marcus Kane, alone in his childhood home, haunted by memories, with no one for company but Diana Sydney.  She wished she were a kinder person, she wished she were more like Clarke or Jake, to find room in her heart for compassion.

But drunkenly hijacking a wedding to cause a humiliating scene was the kind of act for which Abby thought it perfectly reasonable not to forgive a person, even twenty years later; and though deep down, if she were really honest with herself, she knew that half the fault for the erosion of the two men’s friendship lay on her husband’s side (it’s not like _he_ had extended an olive branch in the last two decades either), it was a little more difficult to hold Jake accountable for his mistakes now that he was dead.

Still, she'd spent her first six days at the lodge ping-ponging between her bedroom and the dining room and back again, when she couldn't come up with a pressing excuse to find somewhere else to go, and she was starting to feel stifled.  They'd had grand balls and celebrations here, once, and at its peak capacity the place could hold fifty guests; surely there was a room with a half-decent card table where Clarke could draw, and an armchair where she could read (though that would require another trip back to the garage of their new house to dig through the boxes for one of the several dozen marked "BOOKS"). Anything to avoid the feeling of spending an entire afternoon cooped up on her bed.

Clarke was already out the door by the time Abby made it down to the dining room - Bellamy, it seemed, had decided she was ready to learn how to operate the wood chipper, which was always assigned to the morning shift, and training with Indra began promptly at eight - so Abby took her breakfast alone.  Spiced apple compote over a cornmeal waffle, today, dusted thickly with nutmeg and cinnamon.  (Neither Griffin was much of a cook, and both were dreading the inevitable January letdown of being left once more to their own culinary devices, with nothing but PowerBars and cold cereal in the mornings.)  Abby finished her breakfast, poured a steaming mug of coffee from the sideboard to take with her, and made her way swiftly out the dining room's side entrance, the one that led to the lesser-used back hallway instead of the grand French doors into the lobby.  This was deliberate, the result of scientific analysis and experimentation; she'd observed immediately that keeping breakfast brisk and short was one way to minimize her run-ins with Marcus.

On weekdays, it was slow enough that Charmaine, the head chef, ran the breakfast service herself; there were no waiters to speak of, as far as Abby had seen.  Abby liked Charmaine - dry, sarcastic, tattooed, ex-military, and heavily pregnant, she was a supremely unlikely hire for someone like Marcus, and the fact that he’d taken a chance on someone like her almost made Abby like him better.  (Especially when she considered how uniquely suited the woman was to annoy Diana Sydney.)  But no matter how slow it was, Marcus always popped in every hour on the hour for a few minutes to check on the guests.  Abby had determined that if she arrived promptly at ten minutes after eight, she could order, eat, and get the hell out before Marcus returned to make the rounds again. If Charmaine noticed this pattern, she did not remark upon it, though her silently-raised eyebrow said plenty as she cleared away Abby's plate and watched her slip out the side door with her coffee just as Marcus was entering from the lobby.

Eden Tree Lodge was a vast, sprawling estate, four stories high and hewn by hand from the pine trees that had once grown where it now stood, worn by wind and weather and generations of hands to a glassy rounded smoothness inside and out.  The top floor of the lodge had always been the Kane family's private residence, and the second and third floors housed the guest rooms.  But the main floor, which from Abby's childhood recollections had once been entirely open to the public, was now a labyrinth of quiet hallways and closed doors.  Once you made it past the lobby and the dining room, there was nothing to see.

Abby wandered idly with her coffee down the longest hallway, which ran from the back of the lobby's grand staircase all the way to the south wing on the opposite side of the building.  From time to time, she passed doors labeled “STAFF ONLY” in elegant hand-lettering she recognized, with a pang, as Callie’s.  One of these was Marcus’ office, to which he would be returning in just a few minutes, so she hurried past it without lingering.  She tried the unmarked doors; some were locked, some were closets or rooms clearly used for storage, two were bathrooms.  Very little of interest.  But across from the office, three or four doors down, she stopped short in front of an ornate pair of double doors, carved with looping garlands of vine around the frame.

Curious, she tried the handle, which opened with no resistance.  The door swung open before her, and as she stepped across the threshold, her breath caught in her throat.

Oh, it was beautiful.  And it was so Callie it hurt.

She had stumbled into a kind of parlor-turned-library, crowded with deliciously comfortable and pleasantly-mismatched furniture designed for leisurely reading.  Buttery-soft leather club chairs circled the fireplace, while a gleaming mahogany table anchored the other end of the room.  In the center, two pine-green velvet sofas faced each other over a low coffee table Abby thought might have been carved from the same wood as the walls of the lodge.  A deep, comfortable windowseat was tucked into a floor-to-ceiling bay window, graced at the top by a border of stained glass.  An elegant writing desk, plucked right from Jane Austen, sat beside it.  And everywhere, books. Books on shelves so high Abby could not reach the top, books on the mantel sandwiched between marble busts of Shakespeare and Galileo, books stacked on the mahogany table as though waiting to be reshelved by an owner who never came back for them.

It was freezing cold, thanks to a vast wall of frost-covered windows and a fireplace no one had used in years, and the faint whiff of artificial lemon in the air combined with the faintest layer of dust on every surface told Abby everything she needed to know.  Marcus cared enough about this room that he paid for it to be kept it in order, but no one ever came in here except the cleaning staff.

The room had a strange hush to it that made Abby feel as though she were intruding - not the soothing quiet of a library, full of warm human sounds like breath and pencil scratches and the flip of pages, but a musty silence that caused her to look over her shoulder almost guiltily as she stepped inside, like the presence of a living body had disrupted the room's very air.

But after all, how much trouble could she be in? This place had obviously once been meant for guests, and the door wasn't locked, and there was no sign, and the thought of having something resembling a living room for the next three weeks instead of bouncing from bedroom to dining room and back again was too compelling to resist, so this couldn’t _really_ be considered trespassing.  Could it?

She found herself increasingly grateful for the hot coffee in her hands as she made her way around the room, the sound of her footsteps disappearing into the plush carpets - both to ward off the library's heavy chill, and as an anchor to reality.  The sharp aroma and the heat seeping into her bones through her palms kept her grounded.

Traces of Callie everywhere.  

Here, a vase she would surely have spotted as a hidden treasure at the Tuesday flea market, and carried home to Marcus crowing with delight over having bargained the seller down to three dollars; there, a copy of _Sense and Sensibility_ with a grocery store receipt as a bookmark (Callie was forever pulling random pieces of paper out of her purse to use as bookmarks, dog-eared envelopes and grocery lists and the stubs of old train tickets, because she was always reading between three and six books at a time and never carried bookmarks with her, something that had always driven the more fastidious Marcus mildly crazy).  

He’d closed the door when Callie died, she realized, and never gone in again.

It was impossible to hate Marcus Kane in this room.  Abby felt twenty years of anger dissolve and drain out of her body, so swiftly that the sensation left her feeling oddly hollow.  They’d both loved Callie Cartwig, and they’d both lost her, but Abby got to work through that loss in Boston, in the middle of the life she'd built with no traces of this town or the people she'd left behind.  Meanwhile, Marcus slept every night above an untouched shrine to his wife's death.

It was a little easier, now, to wrap her head around the appeal of Los Angeles and Diana Sydney.  Not to say she'd changed her mind that both of them were terrible ideas, but it was hard to fault the man for wanting the kind of clean slate that she and Jake had given themselves.

The kind of clean slate she'd hoped returning to Arkadia might be, since every corner of Boston was full of Jake.

Then “What the hell are you doing in here?” boomed an irritable voice behind her, and the compassion Abby had been feeling - compassion which had very nearly begun to approach something resembling friendliness - evaporated as quickly as it came.

 “Hi,” she said cheerfully, turning around to see Marcus glowering at her from the doorway.  “I was just taking a look around.”  She pointedly refused to apologize, or yield any ground, but remained rooted to the spot, casually sipping her coffee.  It was plain to see how much this infuriated him.  "Nice library."

“We don’t use it anymore.”

“So I see."

“If you need to borrow a book, you can take it up to your room.”

 "There was no 'STAFF ONLY' sign on the door," she pointed out reasonably.  “If it’s off-limits for guests, you should say so, and lock it. And maybe move the books someplace where guests can actually find them.”

“It’s not . . . _exactly_ off-limits,” he conceded rather grudgingly, though she could tell with some amusement he’d been briefly tempted to lie.  “But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use it, all the same.”

“Well, that makes no sense.”

“If you need to borrow a book, like I said, you can -”

“For the love of God, Marcus, I’m stuck here for a _month,”_ she interrupted him, exasperated.  “The bedroom is lovely, but it’s a _bedroom._ I cannot live in a bedroom all day. This was not my first choice either, you’ll recall, I am here at the mercy of an enormous tree that crashed through my roof.  We were supposed to be moved into an actual house by now, with multiple rooms and everything, but instead, we are here.  I am not trying to be difficult. I promise, when I am trying to be difficult, you will know.”

Something that might have been a ghost of a smile tugged faintly at the corner of his mouth, though he swiftly repressed it, but it was encouragement enough.

“It smells like Lemon Pledge in here, so you’re obviously paying to keep it clean anyway,” she went on, “and it’s not like the extra expense of firewood will be wildly burdensome, since we are surrounded by literally nothing but trees."

“Abby -”

It would cost you nothing, and it would make my life easier, and quite frankly, I imagine I’m hardly the only guest who would enjoy the use of a room as nice as this.”

“Abby -”

“You could move the coffee service in here, to get it out of Charmaine’s way,” she suggested.  “That way she could turn over the dining room faster, because she wouldn’t have guests sitting in there with their coffee and crossword puzzles for three hours.”

He started to protest again, reflexively, then stopped short mid-"Abby" as though actually considering it.  This was an idea that plainly hadn’t occurred to him. She could feel him softening, so she took a deep breath, steeled herself, and played her ace.

“Callie would _hate_ to see it like this,” she told him gently, “and you know it.”

His head snapped up sharply, eyes meeting hers with a palpable jolt, and suddenly she wondered if she'd gone too far . . . if speaking his wife's name aloud had been a mistake.  Marcus looked at her for a long, silent moment, his face completely unreadable, mouth parted as though he were about to speak, but nothing came out.  Finally he simply gave up, turned on his heel, and walked away. She heard the door to his office latch shut behind him.

 _Well, so much for that,_ she thought wearily, and went back upstairs to her room.  _Lesson learned, I guess._

But after dinner, as Charmaine came around to collect their dessert plates, she nodded over towards the sideboard, and both Griffins noticed suddenly that it was bare.  “Coffee’s in the library tonight, if you want any,” she said, arching that expressive eyebrow at Abby. “Seems someone talked the boss into opening it back up.”

“There’s a _library?”_ Clarke exclaimed.

Charmaine nodded.  “Nice one, too. Never been open to guests all the time I’ve worked here, but it sure is pretty.  And there’s a fire in the fireplace, too.”

“I’m so happy we have somewhere to hang out besides just lying on our beds,” said Clarke, pleased.

Charmaine grinned at her.   _“‘We?’”_ she repeated. “Kid, you’re never here.  You’re down at the tree lot with the Blakes any time you’re not eating.  I don’t think he did it for you.”

Clarke rolled her eyes at this, and missed the flush that swept over her mother’s face.  But Charmaine’s keen eye did not.

_I don’t think he did it for you._

She’d thought, at the time, that she was asking for such a simple thing - the use of a room that deserved to be used, that was all.  But it was so obviously more than that, she could see that now, it was certainly more than that to Marcus, and it was more than that to Charmaine, and now suddenly there was a kind of gravity orbiting around the library that Abby hadn’t asked for or expected and for which she was entirely unprepared.

He’d done it for her.

He’d closed a door when his wife died, and he’d opened it again for Abby.  

Because she’d asked him to, and because she was a paying long-term guest requesting a fairly straightforward accommodation, and because she’d given him a very good reason which happened to make meal service more efficient, sure.  All of that was true.  But when you stripped that away, there was simply the fact that he had given Abby something that felt very much like a gift.

She was not entirely sure how she felt about that.

* * *

 

The library was so blissfully lovely after dinner - warm and cheerful and full of people, with a fire blazing in the hearth and an elderly couple pulling a puzzle out of an old cupboard and books in every pair of hands - that even Clarke could not be pulled away from it, and texted Octavia to take a rain check on late-night margaritas because she needed some “mom time.”  Clarke picked up a battered and much-loved copy of Daphne du Maurier’s _Rebecca_ with “VERA KANE, 1966” written inside it in neat teenage handwriting, while Abby pulled a slim paperback titled _Galileo’s Daughter_ off a shelf of books about science she suspected were probably Marcus’ own collection.  They claimed the two armchairs closest to the fire, sitting opposite each other, sharing a low, plush ottoman, and for the rest of the evening they read and sipped their coffee in contented silence, lulled into a warm stupor by the crackle of blazing logs and the low whistle of wind outside the windows and the quiet voices of people all around them, turning pages and clinking teaspoons, rummaging for puzzle pieces, shuffling a beat-up old deck of cards for solitaire.  

_Home._

That’s what it felt like.  

That’s what had been so strangely missing from the place.  

The building was beautiful and the rooms were perfect and the food was delicious and the view was breathtaking, but there had been something ever so slightly hollow about it, and Abby could sense from the peaceful joy in the room around her that she was not the only person who had felt it.

“We’ll be back in the spring with our son and daughter,” Abby heard the couple with the puzzle remarking quietly to the man playing solitaire next to them.  “We were considering it before, but this convinced us. We always like a place to read together after dinner.”

“I was thinking that myself,” said the man playing cards.  “I’ve never been to Arkadia before, but now that I know about this place, I’ll definitely be back.  I don’t much care for staying in a place where you’ve nowhere to linger all day except your room.”

“Good work, Mom,” Clarke murmured under her breath.  “Between the two of us, I think we just might be able to turn this place around.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Abby stiffly, without looking up from her book.

But at breakfast the next morning, the dining room cleared out promptly by nine, causing Charmaine to give Abby a wink and mouth “nice work” as the whole crowd made their way to the library for coffee, and it was clear that things were turning around already.  The library was full of newspaper readers all morning, and an impromptu game of bridge all afternoon, and only the slightly devious maneuver of leaving her cardigan draped over the back of it during dinner allowed Abby to reclaim her premium fireplace-adjacent seat that night.

The room was utterly transformed, like this.  The fireplace made the dark wood seem to glow from within, burnishing the leather bindings of the oldest books as though they were dusted in gold.  It kept the chill of the snowy wind at a pleasant distance, and the scent of paper and coffee and wood smoke had long since driven away the musty, antiseptic air she’d first walked into yesterday.

This, surely, was how Vera and Callie had always meant this room to be used.  Strangers becoming friends over a deck of cards, well-loved books being discovered and enjoyed all over again.

“Only thing missing’s a Christmas tree,” Abby heard the man on the sofa behind her say to his husband, a remark which she happened to mention to Clarke the next morning over breakfast.  But she was busy spooning blackberry jam onto a buttermilk biscuit as she said it, and missed the look on her daughter's face.

A look which said that Clarke Griffin was cooking up a plan.


	5. December 9th

“So how’s the curmudgeon?”

“Curmudgeonly,” Abby replied dryly to the voice on the other end of the phone as she pulled a faded brown sweater out of the bureau, thought about it, changed her mind, pulled out a green one that suited her eyes better, immediately hated herself for caring, put it back, and took out the old brown one again.

“Has he apologized yet? Or thawed out, at least?”

“No apology, but maybe a little thaw.”   _More than a little,_ murmured a treasonous inner voice, reminding her of the library, but she shushed it firmly, tugging the brown sweater on over her head.

“He’s cute.”

“Keep your voice down, Raven, you’re on speakerphone,” Abby ordered hastily, cheeks flushed, despite the impossibility of anyone overhearing.  “And how do you know what he looks like, anyway?”

“I Googled him.  He’s very stalkable.  Does he smile, like, _ever_?  Because in all the pictures on the Chamber of Commerce website he looks like he’s trying to set something on fire with his eyes.”

“He used to,” said Abby, surprising both Raven and herself.  The setup for another casually dismissive quip about what an asshole the inn's owner was had been perfect, and even she didn't quite know why she hadn't risen to the bait, except that it was somehow more difficult to mock him than it had been when she'd arrived a week ago.  Neither of them had warmed to the other much, but the library had changed something between them, opening a heartbreaking window into how lonely his life had become in the years since last they'd seen each other.  On balance, she thought he was probably still rather more an asshole than not, but he was at least a human being now, with faintly perceptible traces of the Marcus Kane he’d been before any of the terrible things had happened.  True, he still barely acknowledged her, and true, she still briskly evaded him at breakfast; but when they were unable to avoid bumping into each other in the hallways, he at least made eye contact now, which seemed an encouraging sign.

“You’re too quiet,” said Raven, cutting through the silence.  “What are you thinking? You’re thinking about how cute he is, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Want me to hack into his phone and see what he’s saying about you?”

“He’s not saying anything about me.  And stay out of his phone.”

“Come on, Abs, you know light cybercrime is my love language.  And no offense but he seems like the kind of guy where it would take me three minutes to figure out his password.”

“I know that voice.  That’s your matchmaking voice.  Stop it.”

“If you marry him you wouldn’t even have to move.  How’s that for convenient?”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“I love you too,” the girl said irrepressibly, and Abby could hear the teasing grin in her voice.  “Even though you’re an asshole for moving.”

“You could come visit us.  We’ll have a spare guest room once we’re moved in.”

“You’ve got like twenty now,” Raven pointed out, “another point in favor of marrying the grumpy inn guy.”

“Seriously, come visit.  It would make Clarke so happy.”

“The new family moved in this weekend,” said Raven, a little glumly.

“Yeah.  I know.”

“Two kids, it’s a good house for kids.”

“It always was.”

“I thought about walking over to say hi but instead I just watched them out of my window from behind the curtains like a serial killer.”

“Why in God’s name -”

“I don’t _know,_ I was feeling a lot of stuff, the whole thing’s just so . . .”

“You’re acting like we moved to _space_ instead of to Vermont.”

“Well, maybe I’m experiencing delayed emotional reactions.”

“Maybe you’re a pain in the ass.”

“Maybe that’s also true.”

“Come visit,” said Abby, voice suddenly serious and sincere.  “We miss you too.”

“Are you glad you moved home?” Raven asked, perceptive and shrewd as always, unerringly putting her finger on the question circulating around Abby’s mind.

“I’m not sure yet,” Abby confessed.  “I’ll let you know when it feels like we really live here.”

“Once you aren’t stuck in a hotel room all day, you mean?”

“Well, it’s not so bad anymore, Marcus gave me a library, so -”

“Wait, what?” Raven exclaimed, wild with delight.  “Like _Beauty and the Beast_?”

“It’s not like that,” Abby assured her quickly, immediately annoyed at her own choice of words.  “That came out all wrong. I didn’t mean . . . it’s just, there was this library no one was using and I asked Marcus if he could open it back up again, and - never mind.”

“I can’t believe he gave you a library.”

“He didn’t really -”

“This is the most romantic shit I’ve ever heard.”

“He’s engaged to someone else, and I’m not interested, so don’t get any ideas.”

“We’ll see,” Raven said, unconvinced.  “I’m just saying.”

“I lived across the street from you for eight years, Raven, I don’t need you to tell me you think I should start dating again.  I already know.”

“Fine.  But I do, and you should.”

“I’m hanging up now,” Abby sighed, “for real this time.”

“Love you too,” Raven said again, voice merry with mischief, and hung up immediately before Abby could get the last word.

* * *

Down the hill, Clarke and the Blakes were, rather surprisingly, on much the same topic.

“He’s letting you use the _library?”_ Octavia’s voice was incredulous.

"Yep."

"How? Why?"

"I don't know.  Mom asked him, I guess.  But everyone seems to be really enjoying it."

 “I wonder if that’s why business is picking up," said Bellamy.

“It is?”

“Yeah, Charmaine was here before opening to bring the staff some extra cranberry muffins and she said that they’ve already had an uptick in reservations.  It sounds like there were a bunch of people who booked repeat visits when they checked out. And others sounded like referrals from current guests. She didn’t mention the library, but if people are using it, I bet that’s why.”

“You know what I was thinking.  Mom says someone said they wished there was a Christmas tree in there.”

The silence that met this remark was deafening.

Sister looked at brother.

Brother looked at sister.

“What?” Clarke demanded.

“Marcus is . . . how can I put this nicely,” Bellamy began.

“He’s a dick about Christmas,” Octavia cut him off helpfully, earning her a raised eyebrow but no other real protest.

“He and Octavia have the same fight every year,” Bellamy explained.  “He lets us do whatever we want because his apartment looks out over the other side of the hill, so he doesn’t have to see it.  That’s why we have lights and the wooden reindeer sleigh. But he has very strict rules about not putting decorations anywhere he has to look at them.”

“Well,” said Clarke reasonably, “what if we _didn’t_ put them anywhere he has to look at them?  He hasn’t set foot in the library once. He could be as big a Grinch as he wants about it, up in his apartment, and we could just close the door.”

Bellamy hesitated, but Octavia didn’t.  “She has a point,” she said to her brother.  “If the rule about decorations doesn’t extend to the tree lot because Marcus can’t see it, then technically -”

“Octavia -”

“I’m just saying, by the same logic -”

“You _know_ he’s not going to see it that way.”

“If he gets mad, blame me,” said Clarke.  “He won’t yell at a paying guest. And he still seems a little scared of my mother.  If he sees it, and gets mad, we can tell him it’s my fault.”

“You don’t have to -” assured Bellamy, and “Deal!” pronounced Octavia, at the exact same moment, which was the end of the discussion.

If Indra thought anything of it, as she watched them load a tree into the back of the pickup and make their way up the service road to the inn’s back entrance, she kept it to herself, and her thoughts rarely registered on her face unless she wanted them to. But she was quick enough to put the pieces together - the library, the Griffin girl with a scheming expression on her face, the changes in Marcus Kane’s demeanor that were almost imperceptible to any except those who knew him best - and astute enough to wonder what would happen when the ever-growing circle of stubborn women in his orbit finally began to collide with each other.

Diana Sydney, she thought to herself, with more than a little amusement, was _not_ going to be pleased.

* * *

 They settled on a corner between the fireplace and the windows, where the tree’s glow would be visible from the outside as well as to everyone in the room, no matter where they were sitting.  Octavia and Clarke took on the task of shoving all the furniture out of the way as Bellamy anchored the tree into the stand, filled it with water, and swiped a vacuum from the maintenance closet to erase the incriminating trail of pine needles they’d left everywhere from the back porch to the library carpet  


With no access to real decorations, they'd been forced to improvise, and had pilfered whatever they could find, which wasn’t much; there were a few strands of leftover white lights, missing some bulbs, from the tree lot’s supply shed, and a smattering of other odds and ends Octavia had deemed potentially usable: half a roll of the white plastic twine they used to bale the trees, a stack of printer paper, some wire hooks, a silver Sharpie, scissors and tape, some clear plastic icicles Bellamy found at the bottom of a crate, and a bag of cranberries they swiped from Charmaine’s pantry on the way in.  


“It’s not much,” Bellamy said dubiously, handing the grocery bag full of junk to Clarke.  “You might not be able to do much with it.”

“I was an art major,” she reminded him with a grin.  “I’ll be fine.”

“That's true,” said Octavia.  “I think she’s got this.”

“I got this,” Clarke agreed, settling down at the big wooden table, spreading the contents of the plastic grocery bag out in front of her.  “Just you wait. If Marcus won’t give us anything to work with, we’ll just have to show him what we can come up with ourselves.”

Then she shooed them off back down to the tree lot so they wouldn’t be late for their next shifts, closed the door to ensure a little privacy (Marcus would probably find out sooner or later, of course, but if her luck held she wouldn't be in the room when he discovered what they'd done), and set to work.  


The snow fell, the fire crackled, and Tchaikovsky’s  _ Nutcracker Suite _ floated lightly through the air in the background (she’d snuck a few of Mom’s holiday albums into the stack by the library’s CD player, something else Marcus had not yet discovered), as Clarke sat happily alone with a pile of nothing waiting to be turned into art, just as she loved to be.  She’d begun with the cranberries, fashioning a makeshift needle out of an old wire ornament hook to thread the white plastic twine through them and create a garland, which she’d draped over the tree to add a little pop of cheery red to the glossy green branches. Next, she’d turned to a craft her father had taught her as a child at their kitchen table in Boston: tracing folded-paper snowflakes.

But these, even Jake Griffin would have admitted, went far beyond his own skill set.  These were dazzlingly intricate, carefully cut out with a deft artist’s hand to create impossibly delicate confections which hung from the pine branches like cotton candy, or lace.  The white lights peeked through the whorls and diamonds and seemed to glow; even more so once she hung the handful of little clear icicles, strategically placed to catch the most light, and a few paper stars she’d colored silver with the marker Octavia swiped from the tree lot's junk drawer.  


For an improvised Christmas tree decorated only with office supplies and random crap from a storage shed, she was extremely pleased with herself.

She was just setting herself to the task of coming up with some kind of tree topper when she heard the door open behind her, pulling her out of her reverie.  

_Here we go,_ she thought, steeling herself, heart speeding up a little as she began to mentally rehearse her defense to Marcus.  But when she turned around she was surprised to find Diana instead.

“My goodness, you’ve been busy,” she said in a tone Clarke couldn’t quite read, casting an appraising eye over the Christmas tree.  Clarke found herself suddenly self-conscious of her plain, homemade ornaments, seeing them as Diana must and reading something that might have been displeasure in the woman’s eyes.  But it passed so quickly she wondered if she had imagined it, and when Diana finally met her eyes, she was smiling. “Lovely,” she pronounced approvingly, with a small nod. “It’s certainly a change - all of this is," she added, gesturing expansively at the library, "but I think a rather nice one. Though I’m surprised Marcus agreed to it.”

“Well, he hasn’t yet, exactly,” said Clarke a little awkwardly.  “He’s . . . not here.”

She didn't actually know if this was true, but one could hope.

Diana waved it off.  “Don’t give it a moment’s thought,” she said airily, “I know how to handle him.  If he gets cross, you call me, and I’ll talk him down.”

Clarke thanked her for this, politely, as she was clearly supposed to, but found the woman’s possessive tone impossible not to resent.

“Strange, to see this room in common use again,” Diana observed, looking around it.  “Though you’ve got it to yourself today, I see.” 

“It’s Tuesday,” said Clarke, “there aren’t many guests in the middle of the week.  A lot of people checked out yesterday morning.” She was not quite sure why she was so defensive.

Diana nodded.  “That’s the trouble, I think, with these notions,” she said, gesturing expansively to take in the entire room.  “It might seem like a good idea, on a weekend when things are already crowded, and sure, maybe one or two new guests come out of it, but it’s hardly the kind of thing that can turn a business around."

Diana's nonchalant puncturing of Octavia and Bellamy's new-blossoming hopes - and Clarke's own, if she was being honest with herself - make the girl's cheeks flush with annoyance and embarrassment.  Everything Diana said always sounded so polite, so friendly, yet somehow you always came away feeling as though you'd been ripped to shreds, though you could never quite identify how or why.  She seemed to have an unerring sense for other people's vulnerabilities.

"People who haven’t run their own businesses don’t really understand the difference, of course, and who can blame them," Diana went on, and she was so very obviously referring to the Blakes that Clarke felt her face redden even further.  "A cozy atmosphere is pleasant, of course, but so often illusory. Everyone checks out on Monday, as you say, and by Tuesday once again it’s a big empty room that just costs more to clean now.”

“If it makes people happy when they’re staying here,” said Clarke brusquely, “then I’m not sure what the problem is.”

“There’s no  _ problem,  _ darling,” Diana assured her casually, perching on the arm of the sofa and crossing her legs with an unhurried air.  “None at all. It’s only that such things have got to be kept in their proper proportion. No harm in opening up an old musty room, or bringing in a few holiday ornaments, to make the stay more pleasant for guests.  But that doesn’t change the fact that running the Lodge is a burdensome undertaking for one person, and little luxuries for guests often create extra work for staff.”

“I think you’re wrong,” said Clarke, surprising both of them with her boldness.  “I think if Marcus really wanted to, if he made the place really Christmasy, if it felt homey like this all the time, I think he’d be booked solid from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day and could make enough just from that season to end in the black every year.”

Diana raised an eyebrow.  “That’s a cute idea,” she allowed graciously, “and who knows, perhaps whoever buys it from him will take that under consideration.”

“Not if they only want the land because it’s adjacent to the freeway,” said Clarke, steel in her voice, “and were planning to tear down the lodge anyway.”

Diana was silent for a moment, and Clarke watched her struggling to keep her composure.  The only indicator of her anger was a slight tightening of her jaw. When she finally spoke, her voice was remarkably collected, but Clarke could not mistake the seething rage inside it.

“I know your new  _ friends” _ \- accenting the last word with a faint air of distaste - “down the hill have a lot of very strong opinions about what is, or isn’t, best for Marcus.  Or for Eden Tree Lodge. But they aren’t the ones who have to make the hard decisions. He is. And he does it alone. He takes his own paychecks late to make sure theirs are on time.  He works twelve, sometimes fifteen-hour days. He keeps the books and manages the staff, but he also fixes things when they break and shovels snow out of the parking lot and helps Charmaine with the breakfast service when it’s busy.  Bellamy Blake, who pops in for a few weeks every Christmas vacation before going back to grad school, is not a reliable source of information on what it is like to live with that kind of stress and anxiety year-round. But I am. Because I’m the one who is _here._  I am the one who is trying to free him from the weight of a burden left to him by his family. If you have a better idea, please. By all means. We would both be happy to consider it. But if you think you can come in here with some scissors and paper and string up some cranberries and save the inn, as though that’s a solution neither Marcus nor I have thought of, then you’re as naive as your mother.”

Clarke had no idea how to respond to this, except to bite her lip to force back the mortifying sting of tears. It felt, for all the world, like being called to the principal’s office.  She felt scolded and small, and defensive on Bellamy's behalf, and it was almost a relief to realize that, even though everything Diana said made logical sense, Clarke was now done making any attempt to like her.  


Sensing, perhaps, just how very unwelcome she was, Diana rose gracefully from her perch, twisting the knife one final time on her exit by patting Clarke’s head as though she were a child.  “Now, you know I don’t mean any offense by it,” she said kindly, making her way to the door. “The tree is really very sweet.  I’m sure this week's guests will enjoy it very much. And besides, it’s always good to have a hobby.” Then she sailed out the door, leaving it wide open behind her.

Clarke did not get up to close it - though she wondered, later, how things might have turned out differently if she had.  


Instead, she set down the scissors in her hand (which she had indulged more than one idle fantasy of hurling at Diana) and walked over to the tree, regarding it thoughtfully.  She tried to see it as the Blakes would see it - no doubt thrilled she’d managed to come up with anything at all from the bag of random crap they’d given her. She saw it as her mother would see it - a dazzling display of her brilliant daughter’s creativity, the way she’d seen everything Clarke ever made from the first time she dipped her chubby baby hands into finger paint.  She even saw it as her father would have seen it, amazed that she’d taken the simple trick he’d taught her with scissors and construction paper to turn it into real art.

She saw it as Diana Sydney had seen it - tacky, homespun, a little desperate. 

Ramshackle. 

Cheap. 

Reflecting poorly on the elegance of the establishment.

She tried to see it as Marcus Kane would see it, but she could not figure him out at all.

Though as it turned out a few moments later, she didn’t have to.

Footsteps on the carpet caused her to turn around, where she saw the man himself standing, arms folded, face impassive, regarding the contraband tree in the corner of the room with an expression she could not read.

"Ah," was all he said.  "I see you've met the Blakes."

“Don’t be mad at them,” she said immediately.  “It was all my idea. I wasn't trying to get them in trouble.  Don’t fire them.”

He sighed, scrubbing his hands over his face and running them through his hair with a gesture of weary exhaustion, causing her to wonder if today was one of those twelve-to-fifteen hour days too.  “I’m not going to  _ fire _ them,” he said, drawing in closer to the tree to stand by her side and look at it more closely.  “I’m not an asshole, Clarke.”

“Well -” Clarke began to protest, then cut herself off immediately, vexed at herself for saying too much.  But it seemed to crack some kind of wall between her and Marcus, and she heard a faint chuckle from beside her, though she didn’t quite have the nerve to turn and look.  


“Okay,” he conceded, as though she’d managed to complete her extremely impolite thought.  “That’s fair. Knowing the things you probably know about me.”

“I know hardly anything about you,” she said, surprised at her own bluntness.  “I didn’t even know about the thing - the wedding thing - until we were driving over here from the house.  I remembered your name from stories my parents told about Arkadia, but usually as like . . . a side character in a story about Mom and Callie.  Or about them and Thelonious. I had no idea what you would be like before I met you.”

“And what am I like,” he said softly, “now you’ve met me?”

She gambled on direct honesty, made easier by the fact that they were both looking at the tree and not each other.  “I think you don’t add up,” she told him frankly. “Nothing about you says you’d have any interest at all in moving to Los Angeles.  Nothing about you says you’re the kind of man who would get drunk and ruin a wedding where you were the best man. Nothing about you says you really think selling this land for some developer to swoop in and raze it to the ground for condos is a good idea.  And yet apparently, all of those things are true.”

There was a long silence.  “A thing can be both true, and a great deal more complicated than you understand it to be,” he finally said.  “There’s more to all three of those stories than you think, Clarke.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“I don’t -” he began, then stopped himself.  The silence that followed was desperately uncomfortable, but Clarke's curiosity won out, and she waited, somehow sensing that if she let the sentence hang in the air long enough, he'd eventually come back to finish it.  


When he did, the words tumbled out in a rush, as though he'd surprised even himself, and startled her into finally turning to look directly at him for the first time.

“I don’t want to be the man your mother thinks I am,” he finally said.  


There was no possible response to this, but fortunately, he didn't seem to expect one.  He simply reached  into his pocket, pried a dented brass key labeled “STORAGE” off his key ring, and pressed it into her hands.  “Fourth floor, top of the stairs,” he said with no preamble.  “The shelves on the right-hand side.”

“Marcus, what are you -”

“Can’t have a Christmas tree without a star at the top,” he said, and before she could ask him anything else, he was gone.


	6. December 12th

“So I heard a rumor,” said Roan, dropping casually into the red vinyl booth across from Diana and jolting her into very nearly dropping her tea.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed, casting a frantic, hasty glance over her shoulder.  The cafe was nearly empty, save for a few people on laptops or reading books, who enjoyed the lull after the dinner rush as Diana did.  The service here was terrible during the busy hours, waitstaff chatting with seemingly every customer as though they had all the time in the world, and Diana was plainly the only person who minded it, so it always made her feel like she was going crazy.  But her office, across the street, was having the heat fixed today, so she’d been working from this booth since seven this morning, and what it lacked in style or efficiency or avocado toast, it made up for in peace and quiet. Nobody in this town cared for Diana, particularly, so nobody bothered her.

Which was why Roan’s unexpected arrival startled her so badly.

“Came to say hi,” he said, leaning back against the booth and draping his arm over the top with an insouciant air that didn’t fool her.  “You haven’t been returning my calls.”

“Things are busy.”

“Sure they are,” he agreed easily.  “That’s what we figured. And not that you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” retorted Diana, who had _absolutely_ been avoiding him.

Roan waved the waitress over and flashed his most charming smile.  “Coffee, cream, two sugars, on Ms. Sydney’s tab,” he said to her. “Thanks, doll.”

“To go,” said Diana firmly, “he’s not staying.”

Roan raised an eyebrow at this, but didn’t say anything until the waitress had departed.  “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you didn’t want to be seen with me.”

“I just don’t think -”

“And the only reason you wouldn’t want to be seen with me, far as I can see it anyway, is if you still haven’t told your boyfriend about our deal and you’re afraid of it getting back to him.  Which is interesting. Because, like I said. I’ve heard some rumors.”

“What on earth are you talking about? What rumors?”

“That Kane’s changed his mind about selling.”

“He hasn’t changed his mind, nothing’s changed,” she insisted.  “We’re still moving forward.”

“Set a wedding date yet?”

“I think that question’s rather of a personal nature, Roan.”

“All right, let me try another.  Set a date for moving to LA yet?” Diana was silent.  “Has he bought a plane ticket? Has he packed a single box?”  

“It’s a slow process, everything takes forever with Marcus.”

“You told me you’d talked him out of doing anything like advertising or promotions for future bookings,” said Roan.  “The fewer customers we have to disappoint when we tell them the lodge is going out of business, the less bad press we’ll get when the resort opens.  The new owners want to be able to roll his customer base right over into theirs. If he’s suddenly out there trumpeting the appeal of his rustic, local, homegrown log cabin aesthetic - “

“Roan, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about you promising me that Kane wasn’t putting any effort anymore into drumming up future business, and now suddenly the inn’s filling up spring travel dates left and right.  Out of nowhere. What’s going on up at the lodge, and why the damn hell didn’t you stop it?”

Diana’s blood went cold.

She hadn’t been back to Eden Tree Farm since that run-in with Abby’s daughter the other day, which had left her a bit more rattled than she cared to admit.  The girl’s naive optimism was maddening, so like both her parents. But Marcus had come over for dinner yesterday and, though he hadn’t stayed the night despite her best attempts at seduction, he had apologized sincerely for neglecting her lately, and when she’d asked how things were at the inn, he’d hesitated before simply answering, “Complicated,” and pouring them both more wine to change the subject.  This had seemed so promising to Diana - surely he was finally remembering the importance of her role in his life, surely he knew now that the inn was a burden he didn’t want - that she hadn’t risked it by pushing it further. She’d simply patted his hand, spent the rest of the evening being increasingly affectionate, and pressed harder than normal to coax him to sleep over. But Charmaine had an 8 am ultrasound, so he was on breakfast duty alone, and he never liked driving back from her place in the mornings, so she let him go with nothing more than a longer-than-usual goodnight kiss.  Overall, though, she’d been quite pleased with her work.

Which is why Roan’s words came as such a shock.

“I can see you getting pissed at me for being the bearer of bad news,” he said, taking the coffee the waitress handed to him with a flirtatious wink and another “thanks, doll” before waving her away, “and I just want to state again for the record that this is all your own fault, for listening to Mother instead of me.  I told you from the start, Di -”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I said, there’s a direct way to do this and a sneaky way to do this, and the direct way saves us all a lot of uncertainty and time.  It also has the side benefit of probably being better for your future marriage, though let’s be honest, that’s not really my concern. Mother was the one who said to work on him with whispers and manipulation so he’d think the whole thing was his idea and then once he’s ready you could present the deal on a silver platter and be the hero.  Mom was the one who said you should get into his head, psych him out, keep reminding him how hard this job is, how tired he is of this town, and how nice it would be to just torch the whole thing and walk away with no baggage. I was the one who said, ‘for Christ’s sake, woman, just tell him you already found a buyer and made an offer.’ I was against that shady contract from the beginning.”

“I don’t want to talk about the contract,” she hissed under her breath, frantically gesturing him into silence as she cast another furtive glance over her shoulder again.  “It’s still in his desk drawer. It won’t come to that.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Roan shrugged.  “It’s up to you,” he said, sipping his coffee.  “But you’re in too deep to pull out of this now without bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down.  So it sure would make everyone’s lives a lot easier if you could get a ring on your finger by the first of the year in case we need to use it.”

“Stay out of my personal life, Roan.”

“Believe me, I’d like to. But right now your personal life is jeopardizing a seven-million-dollar corporate investment and the future of my mother’s company.  Mt. Weather Holdings won’t wait around forever, Diana. They’ve got three other sites, all in New Hampshire. It’s not just city council leaning on us to close this deal, it’s the statehouse and the governor.  This is the only chance to get them to start developing in Vermont.”

“I’m aware of that, Roan, I did my homework too.”

“Then I’d suggest you put whatever penny-ante clients you’re working on today on hold,” he said, gesturing distastefully at her laptop and papers, “the blacksmith selling the back of his lot to the Ye Olde General Store or whatever -”

“It is in fact 2018 here, I’ll have you know.”

“ . . . and trot on up to Eden Tree Farm to have a word with your boyfriend and get him to cool it on hustling for spring bookings.  I heard three separate conversations about it while I was running errands yesterday, and that’s three too many. If this place becomes a _success_ again?”

“I know, Roan.”

“We need to control this narrative.  ‘Shabby former landmark, a shadow of its old self, replaced by glamorous and exciting opportunities, bringing in new jobs and transforming the town.’  That, I can sell. ‘Fading inn abruptly turns around thanks to the power of community spirit, only to be razed to the ground and replaced by a soulless corporate development?’ What is this, a Hallmark Christmas movie?”

“I _know,_ Roan.”

“I don’t want us to be villains here, Diana,” he said, taking a final sip of his mug before rising to depart.  “We’re just people doing our jobs. Show us you can handle this, and we’ll know you can handle Los Angeles. Screw this up, and there’s no place for you at our company.”  He patted her on the shoulder. “Not trying to be an asshole. Just think it’s always best to be direct about things. Thanks for the coffee. Pick up the phone when I call next time, and I won’t have to stalk you again.”

Then he flashed one final “thanks, doll” at the waitress and departed to the cheerful sound of the sleigh bells hanging from the diner’s door.

* * *

Abby returned from her nighttime walk, pink-cheeked with cold and desperate for tea, only to find the pump pot full of hot water at the library’s coffee station empty.  Charmaine had had a busy day, so Abby decided to take the liberty of carrying it back to the kitchen and filling it herself to save the pregnant woman a trip, in exchange for a cup of the decaf Earl Grey she knew the cook secretly hoarded for herself in the pantry.

When she knocked on the kitchen door, though, the voice saying “Come in!” wasn’t Charmaine’s.  

It was, inexplicably, Clarke’s.

Abby pushed the door open to find the kitchen surprisingly full of people, none of whom were Charmaine.  At the massive butcher-block table sat her daughter along with Bellamy and Octavia Blake, and Marcus Kane - who, against all probability, was currently sprinkling gold glitter onto a Christmas cookie.

“Hi,” said Abby.  “Did I fall down and hit my head on something?  Am I hallucinating this?”

“Marcus is really good at baking,” said Clarke.  “Look, we’re making gingerbread angels with all the guests’ names on them to give them at breakfast tomorrow!”

“That is a wildly optimistic interpretation of what’s happening here,” said Marcus.  “We did make gingerbread angels, and we have been attempting to put names on them, but currently we have a plate of twenty-six which Clarke has deemed of subpar quality which cannot be given to guests, and a plate of three she has deemed acceptable.”

“Two,” said Octavia.  “I ate Abby’s.”

“One,” said Bellamy.  “I ate Clarke’s.”

“So really you’re just decorating cookies and then eating them,” said Abby.  “And this has nothing to do with the guests at all.”

“It’s not my fault that they all have terrible frosting skills, Mom.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you,” said Abby, “I’m reserving all my judgment here for the person who should be providing adult supervision.”

“They’re adults,” said Marcus.  “Everyone at this table is an adult.  And I’m not the one being difficult. Your daughter here seems to think that just because she was an art major, that writing perfect calligraphy in royal icing is a basic skill that everyone should have, and she is a very impatient teacher.”

“It’s basically an assembly line system now,” explained Octavia.  “We got tired of getting yelled at. I cross the names off the list, hand the cookie to Clarke, she decorates it, Marcus puts on the glitter and sprinkles, Bellamy ties on the ribbon, and we move on to the next one.”

“You’ve been at this how long?”

“Two, three hours,” said Octavia.

“And you’ve produced one usable cookie?”

“I didn’t say it was a _good_ system.”

Abby sighed.  “Shove over,” she said to Bellamy, who was seated on the bench opposite Marcus.  “I’m tagging in. Clarke, baby, I need you to lower your standards from 100 to somewhere between 65 and 70 so we can get thirty-six cookies finished before bed.  I promise you, no one will die if they get smudged frosting.”

“But -”

_“No one will die.”_

“Fine,” Clarke huffed, far more theatrically than necessary, as Abby tossed her scarf and puffy vest onto the chair in the corner and slid onto the bench across from Marcus.  His eyes met hers with a wry, amused grin, and something inside her cracked open, just a little, at the thought of the change just a few weeks had wrought in him.

She watched him work for a moment, flannel shirt rolled up to his sleeves, brow furrowed in concentration as he sprinkled delicate pinches of edible gold dust onto the white royal icing with which Clarke had festooned the cookie in his hand.  “DAVID,” this one said. Marcus gilded the angel’s swirling halo with the gold flakes, then took a pinch of blue sugar crystals to drop over the curlicued letters, before handing it to Bellamy who carefully strung a ribbon through the hole at the top of the halo.

“I think this could be a nice tradition,” said Clarke absently.  “Everyone who visits in December gets a cookie ornament when they check in.”

“Speaking of traditions,” said Bellamy suddenly, “did you guys hear about the pageant?”

“What about it?” asked Marcus.

“They’re canceling it.”

“Canceling what?” asked Diana Sydney, sailing into the room and regarding them all with an expression of intense and mildly irritated curiosity.  “And what on earth are you doing?”

“The Christmas pageant, apparently,” said Abby.  “What a shame.”

“Indra ran into Thelonious at the hardware store and he told her and she told us,” said Bellamy.  “The county inspectors came by St. Agatha’s and apparently the choir loft failed some earthquake safety rating test and they have to do a ton of repairs before it’s cleared for public use again.”

“What are they going to do about Mass?” asked Marcus.  Octavia raised an eyebrow at him.

“When was the last time you went to Mass?” she asked skeptically.

“I’m just saying, it’s Christmas, people are going to want to go to church.”

“The Lutherans are sharing,” said Bellamy, “they’re doing their morning service at 10:30 instead of 10 so St. Agatha can borrow their church and have theirs at 9.  But the church is already booked on Christmas Eve so they can’t do the pageant there.”

“Well, that’s a pity,” said Diana absently.  “But nothing lasts forever, I’m sure the kids will be fine.  Marcus, darling, can I speak to you for a moment?”

“Is it urgent?” Marcus asked. “We’re right in the middle of a bit of a mess, as you can see.”

Diana hesitated.  “No,” she finally said.  “It can wait.” As she turned to go, it was Abby, surprising even herself, who stopped her.

“Come sit,” she said, gesturing at the empty seat next to Marcus.  “Join us. Have a cookie.”

Diana hesitated, as though assessing whether or not this was a trap, before finally electing to shed her elegant wool coat and seat herself next to her fiance, moving her chair slightly closer to his as she did so, subtly enough that only Abby seemed to notice the proprietary gesture.

“You know what you should do,” Abby said to Marcus.  “You should have it here.”

“Have what?”

“The church Christmas pageant.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look at Abby, Marcus included.  His face was difficult to read, as it always was, but he seemed to be giving the idea genuine consideration.

“What?” exclaimed Diana.  “Abby, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious.  The town would love it, the guests would get a kick out of it, and you’d win the parents’ gratitude for life.  All good things for a local business owner.”

“That’s true,” said Octavia.  “Plus there’s that huge ballroom you never use, we could fit the whole town inside it practically.  Like, you might be the only other person in Arkadia who actually has enough space.”

“Nonsense,” said Diana briskly, “it’s not Marcus’ responsibility to open up his doors, spend a huge amount of money on food and drink, and inconvenience the staff, just so the children can perform for a larger audience.  They can do it in a classroom or something.”

“Oh, relax, Diana,” said Abby, dismissing her protests with a hand wave.  “You’re just mad that your days as the star of the Christmas pageant are behind you.”

“Really?” Octavia exclaimed.  “Diana was Mary? That seems so . . . unlikely.”  Then she winced as her brother kicked her under the table.

Abby laughed.  “Mary doesn’t have any lines,” she said.  “Nobody in the stable actually gets to sing or speak.  The real plum part, the ones the older girls fought over, was the Christmas Angel, because the Christmas Angel is the only one who gets to sing a solo.”

“Diana was the Christmas angel every year in high school,” said Marcus.  “She has a beautiful singing voice.”

This was the first genuinely warm thing Abby had heard him say about Diana - so often, his insistence on her better qualities rang hollow, defensive -  and it made her like him better. She felt so kindly towards him, in fact, that she swallowed back every sarcastic comment she could have made about teenage Diana’s titanic ego, or the smug self-satisfaction that had led the other girls in choir to refer to her as “Princess Di” behind her back.  Instead, she bit her tongue and nodded in agreement, which by Abby standards amounted to a sizeable concession.

“What did you sing?” asked Clarke politely.

“I’m sure I can’t remember, dear,” said Diana dismissively, at the exact same moment that both Abby and Marcus said, in unison, “The Sussex Carol.”

Diana looked from one to the other and back again.  “How odd, both of you remembering that,” she said, plainly torn between her instinctive distaste for anything that unified the two of them against her - no matter how infinitesimal - and the implied compliment to the quality of her singing.

“You got the good verse,” Abby said, “I always remembered.  The middle school choir did the first two, and then they parted in the middle like the Red Sea and out came the Christmas Angel with her glitter halo and her glitter wings.”

“The wings you got when you were in middle school choir did not have glitter on them,” Marcus explained.  “So getting promoted to glitter wings was a _very_ big deal.” He looked at Abby and smiled. “And that was my favorite verse too.   _‘All out of darkness, we have light.’_  I always liked that line.”

“Marcus, were you in the choir?” asked Bellamy, carefully managing to maintain an entirely straight face.  “Did you get to wear glitterless wings?”

“Oh, no, there were no boy angels,” said Marcus, shaking his head in mock sorrow.  “We took traditional gender roles very seriously in those days.  The girls were angels and the boys were shepherds. We all had to shuffle around in our dad’s bathrobes, with kitchen towels tied to our heads, and then we had to sing 'While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night,' which always went very badly.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Abby interjected, “you’re forgetting the most important part of this whole story.  I can’t believe you’ve neglected to mention that you and Callie played Mary and Joseph four years in a row.”

The words tumbled out laughingly, but time stopped for a moment as they landed, causing Abby to immediately wonder if she’d made a mistake.  Bellamy and Octavia had never heard anyone bring up Marcus’ dead wife so casually, particularly in the presence of Diana, who plainly did not like it.  

All eyes swiveled to Marcus, to see how he would take it, and the gaze of both Abby and Diana was particularly keen.  He seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though weighing whether he wanted to shut the conversation down or not, but it was Clarke who stepped in to save him.             

“What a pity,” she said brightly, “that you’ve only grown into the perfect beard for Joseph now that you’re too old to play him.”

Diana shot the girl a horrified look, but Marcus burst out laughing. 

“I’ll have you know,” he retorted with great indignation, “that that Joseph beard was made out of only the finest fake fur from the craft store, and made me feel extremely adult.”

“Oh my God, that’s so sad,” said Octavia.  "How incredibly embarrassing for you."

“If this is the first you’re learning that Marcus was not cool in his youth, I’m very sorry to be the means of disillusioning you,” said Abby.  “But it’s time you learned the truth.”

“In my defense, I only auditioned because Callie was doing it, and she didn’t want to be married to a boy she didn’t know.”

“And you were so good at standing there in a brown burlap sack and saying nothing while staring at a plastic baby that they kept you on all through high school.”

“Better that than a Wise Man,” Marcus shuddered.  “They had to wear those mothball-smelling old silk robes that we all thought were so cool when we were seven, and then by the time you’re old enough for the role you’d rather set yourself on fire than be seen in public wearing them.”

“Oh, yeah, nobody _ever_ wanted to be Wise Men,” said Abby.  “They always had to just randomly pick three boys who had hit puberty so their voices had dropped low enough to sing ‘We Three Kings’ without sounding ridiculous.”

“Not that it mattered,” added Diana, “they never sounded good anyway.  Teenage boys can’t sing.”

“Well, they can’t sing as well as _you_ could sing,” Marcus conceded, “but Jake got promoted from Shepherd to Melchior senior year, and he honestly wasn’t bad.”

“He's not here, you don't have to lie," said Abby, "Jake was terrible and you know it.  I almost broke up with him, I was so mortified."

Clarke looked up sharply at her mother, and was stunned by what she saw.  They were grinning at each other, laughing even, Callie and Jake’s ghosts so near they felt palpable and yet bringing only the joy of fond memory, not the bitterness of loss.  

Clarke hadn’t heard her mother say her father's name like that since the day he died.

“The bar was low,” Marcus admitted, “and there weren’t very many good options, so I feel like you have to at least concede that Jake wasn’t the worst of the lot.”

“The only reason there were never any good options is because the boy with the best singing voice in our class kept re-upping for the non-speaking role,” said Abby pointedly.  “You’re full of shit that you auditioned for Joseph because of Callie. You did it to escape having to sing the weird creepy myrrh verse of ‘We Three Kings,’ which frankly should have been your fate, since you had the deepest voice.  And the best.”

“Yes, but playing Joseph requires gravitas,” said Octavia, “and Kane definitely has that.”

“Thank you, Octavia.”

“Gravitas means the same thing as ‘humorless,’ right?”

“I retract my thanks.”

“Wait, Marcus can sing?” asked Bellamy.  “Are you serious?”

Abby stared at him.  “You’ve never heard him sing?”

“This is all news to us,” said Octavia.

“It’s not like I have a lot of opportunities for live performance, Abby,” he said, rolling his eyes.  

“I wish you did.  I haven’t heard you sing since you and Jake were in that stupid band together senior year.  I hated all your songs and I also hated your hair, but you had a very nice voice.”

“You’ve lost none of your graciousness over the past decades, I hope you know that.”

“Wait, Mom, what were you in the pageant?” asked Clarke.  “You must have been in it too, right?”

“Um,” said Abby, hesitating.  “Not exactly.”

“There was . . . an incident,” said Diana primly.

“Your mother had a problem with authority,” said Marcus to Clarke, eyes twinkling with mischief.  “She did not, then as now, take direction well.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be the stupid innkeeper’s wife anyway,” said Abby irritably.  “All she did was stand there with a lantern and point while the innkeeper got all the lines.  So I _very politely_ made some suggestions for additional dialogue, to flesh out her character a little bit more, and I got vetoed.”

“And demoted,” said Marcus.  “To wrangling the baby sheep.  A job for which you were far better suited.  Even at the age of fourteen, you were very good at telling people what to do.”

“You have to admit, we never had well-organized baby sheep until I took them in hand,” said Abby, grinning back.  “They just needed discipline.”

“They were terrified of you.  Sure, they marched in perfect straight lines, but every year at least three of them cried the whole way through ‘Away in a Manger.’”

Abby waved this off.  “Builds character.”

“You just keep telling yourself that,” said Marcus, causing Abby to swat him playfully, which was when everyone else at the table except for Marcus and Abby suddenly realized that Marcus and Abby were flirting with each other, and enjoying it.

Diana began to tense up at this, but the Blakes, united in their desire to shove the unpleasant woman out of the picture all together, and Clarke, who was astonished and pleased to see her mother light up like this, were excessively pleased at this new development . . . which gave Octavia an idea.

“Hey, speaking of using the ballroom,” said the girl, “you know what tradition we could bring back?  The Christmas Ball.”

“Marcus hasn’t even agreed to the first huge inconvenience, and you’re already demanding a second?” exclaimed Diana, perhaps more harshly than she’d intended, but it had the desired effect of causing Marcus and Abby to remember she was there and draw back from one another slightly.  

But Octavia was determined to press her case.  “The Christmas Ball always charged admission, in your mom’s day,” she pointed out hopefully.  “So as a potential new revenue stream -”

“I know, Octavia,” said Marcus wearily. “I’m just not sure what difference it would make.”

“It wouldn’t cost much to run either of them,” added Bellamy.  “I think you’d have a lot of volunteers. They’re both traditions that mean a lot to people.”

“I think we’re all getting a little ahead of ourselves,” Diana interjected, rather desperately.  “Marcus is not an event planner, this is asking quite a lot of him, and it seems rather cruel to the town to relaunch a set of local traditions that won’t continue after this year.”

“‘Won’t,’” repeated Octavia, glowering at Diana.  “That sounds pretty definitive.”

“I just don’t think there’s any point in pretending that throwing a party or putting up a Christmas tree or opening up the library again are going to make the difference between this inn being a success or not.”

“No, you’re right,” said Octavia, “the thing that would make a difference would be if Marcus had a partner who would help him run it so he didn’t have to do it all by himself, a partner who actually cared about what was important to him, but instead, he only has you.”

“That’s _enough,_ Octavia,” said Marcus, rising from his seat and shooting the girl a dark look.  “Go home, all of you. It’s late and we all have to work in the morning. I need to think.  You too, Diana,” he said before she could protest. “I’ll call you in the morning. You can tell me what you needed to tell me then.”

Bellamy shoved his sister unceremoniously out of the room, followed by a worried-looking Clarke, as Marcus picked up Diana’s coat and purse, handed them back to her, and walked her out the back door to her car.  Left alone in the quiet of the kitchen, Abby suddenly remembered she’d wanted tea, and took advantage of the peaceful interlude to put the kettle back on and begin to tidy up the table to save Charmaine a headache in the morning.  

When Marcus returned, fifteen or twenty minutes later, she had found a tupperware container for the cookies, a ziploc bag for all the icing and decorations, and was wiping down the table of scattered sprinkles, dried frosting and gold dust glitter.  

“Everything okay?” she asked carefully, not quite able to look at him.

“I don’t have any idea how to answer that question,” he said, voice dull with exhaustion.  “I need a drink. Would you like a drink?”

“I’ve already looked,” she replied lightly, trying to ease the tension, giving the table one last swipe before tossing the sponge back in the sink and washing her hands.  “Charmaine’s got nothing in her cupboards but cooking sherry.”

“I meant upstairs,” he said, and something in his voice made her stop moving for a moment.  She turned to him slowly.

“Upstairs?” she repeated, and he flushed a little.  

“I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t - “

“No, I know.”

“I wasn’t coming onto you.  I just meant I have bourbon and Charmaine doesn't.”

“That sounds lovely,” she said.  “Thank you.”

* * *

The tension didn’t lift as she followed him down the quiet, darkened halls, past rooms full of sleeping guests, to the apartment at the top of the stairs Abby hadn’t seen since they’d been chemistry lab partners their sophomore year.

“It’s just like I remember it,” she said in a low voice, running her fingertips over the gleaming, seasoned wood of the wall paneling, worn smooth as glass by generations of Kanes, as Marcus made his way over to the neat little kitchenette in the corner of the living room and rummaged around for glasses.  She'd always liked this place.  So little seemed to have changed.  

The door to his bedroom was open, on the other side of the living room, and she couldn't keep herself from noticing that his bed was neatly made, with the same heavy, handmade quilt she remembered from his childhood.  He'd brought it with him when he moved from the smaller bedroom, where he'd grown up, to the larger one he'd taken over after his mother died.  The quilt was stitched with green triangles that looked like Christmas trees; she'd liked it as a kid because it always felt like Christmas in the Kanes' apartment, even in the middle of summer.

She wondered if the quilt had lain on that bed when Marcus and Callie slept beneath it together, or if he had left it in his childhood bedroom and only claimed it back once they were both gone.

“Is this weird for you?” he asked over his shoulder suddenly, as though reading her mind.  “Because of Callie, I mean. I didn’t think. I should have asked.”

“She was so happy here,” said Abby.  “She loved this place. I think I just . . . don’t always let myself think about how much I miss her.”

“Something we have in common,” said Marcus, making his way over to her and handing her a glass before taking a seat on the cozy, plush sofa.  “Neither of us handle loss particularly well.”

“It isn’t that I don’t get it,” she said, taking a seat beside him.  “Selling the place and moving, I mean. I’m not judging you.”

“I know,” said Marcus.  “You were the only one sitting at that table that wasn’t.”

“I couldn’t stay in Boston either.  I packed up and skipped town too.”

“Too many ghosts?” he asked, and she nodded.

“Just the one,” she responded dryly, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, “but God, he was everywhere.”

“And that was in a huge city,” said Marcus, nodding.  “Imagine it in a town like this.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not that I don’t care about this place, or that I wouldn’t miss it.”

“I know that.”

“But Diana has a very clear picture in her head of what she thinks our life should be, and, I don’t know, sometimes it’s very compelling, sometimes I think I can really see the appeal of it, but other times . . . I’m not sure.”

“What do you want, Marcus?” Abby asked him gently.  He took a long swig of bourbon and leaned his head back against the worn leather of the sofa.

“Another drink after this one, and then a good night’s sleep.  That should do it.”

She kicked him gently.  “I’m being serious,” she said, causing him to turn and look at her.  “Octavia and Bellamy and Indra know what they want from you, and Diana knows what she wants from you, but I don’t think _you_ know what you want.”  She reached out and placed her hand over his where it rested on the faded couch cushion.  “What do _you_ want, Marcus?”

He was silent for a long, long, long time, his coffee-brown eyes fixed on hers.  “You know something,” he murmured, “you might be the first person in my whole life who’s ever asked me that.”

“Tell me the answer, then.”

“I don’t have an answer.  I wish I did. All I know is that when I look at all the choices in front of me, none of them feel right.”

 _Does that include your marriage?_ Abby thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say.  Instead, she squeezed his hand and said, “Let’s start small, then.  We don’t have to decide your entire future right this minute. What about the Christmas pageant?”

“I think . . . I think, yes,” he said.  “Don’t you?”

Abby smiled at him.  “Absolutely yes.”

“The kids should get to have their pageant.  They’ve worked hard. Wrangling baby sheep is no joke.”

“Neither is standing there in a brown robe trying to emote at a fake baby,” said Abby.  “Don’t sell yourself short.”

Marcus laughed.  “God, I’ve missed you,” he said, almost absently, as though he was hardly aware of the words as they came out of his mouth, but they both went immediately still.

Abby met his eyes with a long, searching gaze, and gently drew her hand back from his - not a rejection, not exactly, but a moment of needing more space.

“I missed you too,” she said, her voice coming out in a whisper.  “You were my friend. You were always my friend, and then one day you weren’t.”

“Abby,” he said, sitting up, turning to her and setting down his drink, face somber, “there’s something I need to tell you, about that day, it’s been weighing on me for so long and I -”

“Stop,” she said, cutting him off with a shake of the head.  “Stop, Marcus. Don’t. We can’t rip all that open again now.  It’s taking everything I have to keep all of that locked up and if we open that door now, we’re never going to be able to do this again.  Sit here and drink our bourbon on the couch in peace and quiet, like we’re old friends. I’m so tired of being angry at you. I’m so tired of hating you.  Can’t we just put all of that behind us, and pretend none of it happened?”

Marcus looked at her for a long silent moment as though he were weighing something else he wanted to say, but finally he nodded and leaned back against the sofa again, closing his eyes.

“The pageant is one thing,” he said, “but Diana had a point about the Christmas Ball.”

“I know.”

“The pageant will be back in the church next year, no matter what else happens, the pageant is just a one-time thing.  If I bring back the Christmas Ball and then next year I’m in Los Angeles and the lodge is getting turned into, I don’t know, a bunch of condos or something . . .”

“Octavia also had a point, though,” Abby reminded him.  “If part of what’s tempting you to sell the place is that the financial end of it is a struggle, bringing back arguably the inn’s biggest-ever moneymaker could be a big step in the right direction.”

“It’s not just the money,” he said.  “I mean, that’s part of it. That’s a huge part of it.  But one person isn’t enough. This place needs a family to run it.  It needs more than one pair of hands. It needs to feel like a home.  It worked, when it was me and my mother and Callie. But I’m not enough on my own.  I never have been.”  He took another long swig of bourbon. “Sometimes, when you’re the kind of person who destroys everything you touch,” he said, voice sharp with bitterness, “it’s best for everyone to just make a clean break, and let the ghosts lie.”

“Marcus,” she said, astonished at the raw pain in his tone.  “Marcus, come on. That’s not who you are.”

“I’m driving my family’s legacy into the ground, and I lost my two best friends,” he said.  “There’s no one to blame for either of those things but myself. And if I’m not careful, I might -”

But he stopped himself before he could go any further, and set the glass down on the coffee table before standing up and holding out his hand to Abby to help her up.

“Maybe I just need to get some sleep.”

“I think so, yes,” she agreed, taking his hand and letting him pull her to her feet.  A slight stumble against the edge of the coffee table caused her to lose her balance slightly, pitching her into his arms with more force than either of them had intended.  Marcus caught her and set her back on her feet with a small chuckle, but his hands lingered on her arms for a long moment before letting her go.

She looked up at him, meeting his dark eyes, and suddenly realized how close they were standing.

If he leaned down, just a bit, he could -

“Goodnight, Abby,” he said abruptly, stepping back from her and letting all the air back into the room.  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Marcus,” she said, as he closed the door behind her.


	7. December 18th

“She’s jealous.”

Raven’s breezy voice on speakerphone always seemed loudest at the most inconvenient moments, as though she timed it to seem like she was shouting every time she said things Abby desperately hoped wouldn't be overheard.

“That’s what I said!” Clarke exclaimed, as her mother dismissed both girls with an irritated handwave.

“There’s nothing to be jealous _of,”_ she repeated, for the hundredth time.  “You're both insane. Diana and I have never been that close, but even she must know that there’s never been anything between me and Marcus and there never would be.  She’s not as insecure as you're giving her credit for.”

“You’re so full of shit,” said Raven bluntly.  “I can hear it in your voice.”

“I have no intention of coming between Diana and her prize, so both of you can just lay off.”

“Maybe it isn’t _intentional,”_ Raven conceded, “but you have to admit, it sure does seem like you showing up has thrown a wrench in her plans a little bit.  Even if she doesn’t think you want to bang her fiance -”

“Eeew, Raven!” Clarke exclaimed.  “There’s a kid in the room!”

“ . . . but still, it looks like he’s been rethinking some things she might not want him to be rethinking.  Maybe it’s not even about you, romantically. Just that you’re planting ideas in his head that weren’t there before, and she’s getting territorial.”

This notion made a bit more sense to Abby than the wildly implausible one of Marcus harboring a secret crush, and she found herself beginning to genuinely consider it.

It had begun with the library, which had been all her, and then the Christmas tree - which had been Clarke.  The gingerbread had also been Clarke. The pageant was her suggestion and the Christmas ball Octavia’s. But really, wasn’t it all of a piece?

Hadn’t it been her, a week ago, on Kane’s living room sofa, asking him - for the first time in all his life, he'd said - to think about what he really wanted?

What if he had, and it didn’t include Diana?

Was she resisting so hard because she truly believed Raven was mistaken, or because some part of her recoiled at the notion of being responsible - even indirectly - for breaking up their engagement?

“It’s not the same, Mom,” said Clarke’s voice, startling out of her reverie, and she realized she hadn’t even heard the girls exchange goodbyes as Raven hung up.  “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not the same.”

“What's not the same as what, honey?”

“If he doesn’t get married to Diana because of you - or because of us - because of the inn, or whatever - that’s not the same as what he did to you,” said Clarke, startling her mother as always with her perceptiveness.  “Helping him realize that maybe this wasn’t going to make him happy is one thing. Getting drunk and crashing a wedding is different. So if you’re worrying that you’ve turned into a hypocrite, knock it off.”

Her voice was so firm and bossy that Abby had to laugh.  “Tough love time, huh?” she said. “Did we pull a _Freaky Friday_?  Because now _you_ sound like the mom.”

“Well, sometimes I have to,” said Clarke wryly, “when you’re acting like a child.”

“Clarke -”

“Marcus meant a lot to Dad,” Clarke cut her off before she could protest again, and it wasn't a question.  “I mean before. Before it all went wrong. When you guys were young.  Dad loved him a lot.”

Abby was silent for a long, long moment.  “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, we both did.”

“Well, I think Dad would want him to be happy.  And you know something, I think he would want Diana Sydney to be happy too.  Even though it sounds like she was a real dick in high school.”

“She was. But yes, he probably would.  He was a much nicer person than I am."

“Okay, so clearly they aren’t making each other happy.  I mean this is a relationship that is _not_ working.  They don’t want the same things.  It’s so obvious. They should just break up, so she can go off to LA and he can stay here and turn the lodge back into what it’s meant to be.”  Clarke hopped up on the bed beside her mom, wrapped one arm around her shoulder, and flopped them both onto their backs to obtain a better cuddling position.  “And maybe it’s because we arrived here, in the right place at the right time,” she went on happily, head resting on her mother’s shoulder, “that they’re both going to realize that.  That’s good, don’t you see, Mom? That means we _helped._  You didn’t mess anything up.  You’re _helping_ them. Both of them.”

Abby stared up at the wood beams of the ceiling.  Somewhere over her head, Marcus Kane was moving around in his bedroom, thinking complicated Marcus Kane thoughts that remained incomprehensible and opaque to her; they’d become something resembling friends again, the coldness of their first meeting now long gone, but he still had not told anyone what he planned to do after the pageant and the Christmas ball were over, and she had not been able to bring herself to ask.

“You’re young,” Abby finally said, arms tightening around her daughter, pulling her close.  “And you want things to be simple. It feels simple to you, that two people you don’t think are right for each other should just . . . stop being together.”

“It is simple.”

“No, it isn’t.  Nothing about relationships is simple.  And nobody can ever really see what’s going on inside one, except the two people in it.”  She pressed a kiss on her daughter’s forehead. “Now, _I_ would never marry Diana Sydney, and _you_ would never marry Diana Sydney -”

“Because she’s like twenty years too old for me.  And you’re straight.”

“ . . . but it doesn’t necessarily follow that if someone _else_ married Diana Sydney, he would automatically be miserable, just because _we_ would.  People are different, and they’re messy, and what they want is complicated, but I think . . .”  She paused, trying to figure out the best way to phrase it. “I think when people reach a certain age,” she went on, choosing her words carefully, “they’ve become who they are, and you have to take them, to a certain extent, at face value.  If Marcus decides he wants to marry Diana, then it’s because as a rational adult man who is almost fifty years old, he can be trusted to know his own mind better than you do.”

“You don’t even know you’re doing it, do you?” said Clarke, something peculiar in her voice that sounded almost like a realization.  

Abby rolled over onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow, to meet her daughter’s eye. “Doing what?”

“Talking yourself into it,” Clarke said, as though it were obvious.  “You don’t want him to marry Diana, and you don’t think he should, but you’re trying to convince yourself you’re okay with it in case he actually does.”

Abby stared at her, swallowing hard, heart inexplicably speeding up.  “No, honey,” she said uncertainly, “that’s not - I didn’t mean -”

Clarke kissed her mom’s head and sat up.  “It’s okay,” she said, somewhat cryptically.  “We’re taking care of it.”

“You’re what? What? Who’s _we?”_

“Me and Octavia."

“Oh no,” said Abby, sitting bolt upright.  “No, no, please no, honey, tell me you and the Blakes aren’t cooking up some kind of -”

“He’s not going to marry Diana,” said Clarke.  “You can relax, Mom.”

“You and Octavia planning some kind of secret wedding-ruining scheme is not helping me relax.”

“We’re not going to ruin a wedding,” Clarke retorted, wounded.  “We would never do that. It’s not going to get that far.”

“Clarke Eleanor Griffin, don’t you dare -”

“I’ll see you at dinner!” Clarke sang hastily, and bolted out the door.

* * *

“You’re not listening to a single thing I’m saying, are you?”

Bellamy’s impatient voice cut through the muffled din of the bar - and the fog of his thoughts - as Kane shook himself a little and returned to earth.

“What?”

“I’ve been talking for like ten straight minutes about organizing the volunteers for the Christmas Ball and you’re not paying attention to any of it.  Should I just email you?”

Kane rubbed his temples and ran a hand through his hair.  “I’m sorry,” he said honestly.  “I’m a little . . . distracted. I apologize.”

“Big evening plans?” Bellamy couldn’t keep himself from asking, tone a little more snide than he’d intended.  Kane raised an eyebrow, but didn’t respond, and Bellamy relented immediately. “Sorry,” he said. “Turned into my sister for a minute.”

Kane snorted.  “You’ve made very little secret of your own feelings about her over the years,” he said, taking a long swig of his beer, and despite his casual tone there was a flash of real hurt inside it, which made Bellamy feel suddenly guilty.  True, none of them could stand Diana, so none of them cared particularly about her feelings. But he realized for the first time how painful it must be for Marcus, having decided to marry her and spend the rest of his life with her, that the people who cared about him could not even put on a decent facade of pretending they were happy for him.  

Not that it wasn’t deserved - it was hardly pleasant watching her strut around like she owned the place, sizing it up not for what it gave back to the community but for how big a commission it would bring her when the land finally sold.  But for whatever reason, Kane loved her (or Kane _thought_ he loved her, which had netted the same end result so far), and it suddenly felt cold and mean and ugly to punish him for Diana’s behavior anymore.

“I’m sorry,” said Bellamy, more sincerely this time.  Kane raised an eyebrow and took another long drink, but didn't answer.  “Hey. No. I mean it.  I’m sorry. I won’t do it anymore.  And I’ll talk to Octavia. You’re an adult, I don’t get to tell you who to marry.  We can’t control who we fall in love with.”

Kane’s eyes snapped up sharply.  “What did you say?”

Bellamy stared at him.  “I said, we can’t control who we fall in love with,” he repeated patiently, a little confused.

“You mean Diana."

“Right.”  This was weird.  “Sorry, I thought you knew that’s what I meant.  When I was apologizing.”

“Apology accepted,” said Kane, thawing slightly, breezing past the strange moment without explaining himself any further.  “Though . . .” he hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally, voice suddenly heavy, and he seemed to crumble a little bit, right before Bellamy’s eyes.  “Maybe I’m the one who should be apologizing," he went on, though he didn't seem to be speaking to Bellamy anymore.  "To everyone. To her, to you, to the town . . . to my mom . . . to Callie . . . to Jake and Abby -”

“That’s a lot of apologizing,” said Bellamy carefully, not sure how to respond, “and we only have time for two beers before you have to go meet Diana for dinner.  And a couple of those people are dead, so I don’t quite know how to help you there.”

"That's fair," said Kane, and took a long drink of his beer, and then no one said anything for a very, very long time - long enough for Bellamy to wish he'd brought Octavia, the compulsive silence-filler, instead of forcing her to close out alone so he could have what she sarcastically referred to as a "bromantic evening" with Kane.

“What would you do, if you were me?” Kane suddenly asked him, breaking the silence unexpectedly.  “I don’t mean what you, right now, _want_ me to do," he clarified, holding up a hand, before the boy could answer.  "I know what you want me to do.  I’ve always known. The Blakes don’t mince their words,” he added dryly, causing Bellamy to chuckle and wince a little at the same time.  “But I mean, if you were me. My life, my circumstances. My responsibilities. My hometown. My past.  My ghosts. What would you do, Bellamy?  Which life would you choose?”

Kane had never asked him this before - had never spoken to him this way, ever.  Like he was a friend, not a boss who gave occasional Dad Lectures. Like they were just two men in a bar, and one needed advice, and trusted the other to give it.  Bellamy felt a strange flush of pride at this, affection blooming inside his chest, and he took a long drink of his beer to hide the sudden rush of emotion.

 _Oh Jesus, Bell, don’t make it weird,_ he heard his sister’s sardonic voice in his mind.  

Kane had asked a serious question, and it deserved a serious answer.

“I think,” said Bellamy finally, “that I like the Marcus Kane you’ve been since the Griffins arrived a whole lot better than the Marcus Kane you were before.”

Kane stared at him blankly, jaw twitching as though Kane was holding something in.  “That’s not an answer.”

“Yeah it is.  It’s just the answer to a different question. It’s the answer to the thing you didn’t ask me.”

“I don’t want to talk about the Griffins.”

“It has nothing to do with selling the land,” Bellamy said, all restraint evaporating completely.  “Why none of us get along with Diana. It hurts, a little, actually, that it feels like you don’t know that.  We like our jobs, we want to keep them, but we also care about you being happy. And if you were genuinely happy about selling the lodge and moving to Los Angeles - if it seemed like that was what you really wanted - we’d throw you a huge Bon Voyage party, and invite the whole town, and O would bake you, I don’t know, gluten-free hippie vegan kale brownies or something, and we’d fly out there for summer vacation and drag you to Disneyland, or Venice Beach, or someplace else you’d hate, and we’d all miss you, but life would go on, and everybody would be fine.  But the reason it's not fine, Kane,” he said pointedly, “is because _you don’t want that,_ and everybody knows it except for you.  We all saw it coming a long time ago, and that’s why Diana gets under our skin.  Diana’s figured it out, which is why she starts spiraling into crazytown every time she comes up to the lodge.  And Abby Griffin figured it out in thirty seconds, after not having seen you in twenty-five years, which is the part that’s sending you into a tailspin.  Hell, _Clarke_ figured it out, and she’d never even _met_ you. Everyone’s just waiting for you to figure out what’s actually going to make you happy, Kane.  Sell the land, if that’s going to give you the life you want. Or keep it. Marry Diana Sydney, or don’t. But Jesus fucking Christ, man, _do something.”_

The silence that followed was awful, and once the adrenaline rush of finally getting it all out in the open had faded, Bellamy was left with the feeling that he’d crossed a line he couldn’t come back from.  The first time in their whole lives that Kane had come to him for counsel - like a real friend - and he’d fucked it up.

Then, “How in the name of God did you get so wise?” Kane said unexpectedly, and when Bellamy finally looked up from his beer to meet the man’s eyes, Kane wasn’t angry at all.  

He just looked tired, and twenty years older than he had when he sat down.  

“I’m just making shit up as I go along,” said Bellamy.  “Just like everybody else.”

Kane shook his head, his dark eyes suddenly sad.  “No," he said.  "I think I haven’t been giving you credit for being able to see . . . things I suppose I hoped no one could see.  Because if someone could see, then at some point they would point it out.”

“And then _you’d_ have to see it.”

“Exactly,” said Kane wearily.  “Damn you.”

But it was warm, and kind, and resigned, and there was no malice in it, so Bellamy hadn’t broken anything.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Kane. “I suppose . . . I’ll know when I see her.”

“Which one?” said Bellamy, before he could stop himself, and regretted it immediately as a look of raw pain flashed across the older man’s face.

“Diana,” he said tightly.  “There’s only Diana. There’s no one else.”

“No, that’s good,” said Bellamy hastily, reassuring him.  “You have to figure out where you are with her before you think about . . . anything else.  That’s the only way that’s fair to either of them.”

“You’ve got this the wrong way round, kid,” said Kane, standing from the table and pulling a five out of his wallet to toss on the table.  “This isn’t a conversation about choosing between two different women. There’s _one_ woman. And I have to decide what my future is with her.  There is no future for me with -” and he was so very nearly about to say Abby's name before he stopped himself that Bellamy was stunned.

“Hey,” he said, misreading the man’s discomfort.  “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” said Kane grimly.  “And if you knew the things I’ve done, you’d know it too.”

Then he grabbed his jacket from the booth, and was gone.

* * *

“He’s changing his mind,” said Nia tersely.  “You had one job.”

She was more civilized than her son - as well as busier - and she’d phoned instead of plunking herself casually into a diner booth.  But even at a distance, she was by far the more alarming one, and Diana’s heart had dropped into her sleek patent-leather boots when she’d seen the woman’s number pop up on her iPhone.

“He isn’t.”

“It’s all over town, Diana.  The Christmas Ball? _Really?”_

“It won’t happen,” said Diana, with far more confidence than she felt, turning over her shoulder to look back from the frosty sidewalk where she’d stepped out to take her call, to the table inside where Marcus was patiently waiting for her.

“That contract is legally binding,” Nia reminded her.  “This could be over tomorrow if you’d held up your end of the plan.”

“I’m working on it.”

“If you think you can sell him on eloping, we have a very nice luxury resort condo tower on the Las Vegas strip.  I would throw one in for free if it would close this deal more promptly.”

“I’m already struggling to sell him on LA, Nia.  He would never get married in Vegas.”

“Why?” asked Nia.  “Because he’s emotionally attached to this town, and doesn’t really want to leave it? Because if I find out you oversold this to me from the beginning, just to get this job -”

“Of course I didn’t,” snapped Diana, who had done literally exactly that, and was now watching her carefully-laid plan spiral entirely out of control.  “Don’t be absurd.”

“We’re more than halfway through December, with no progress to show the investors,” the other woman said, disapproval etched into her frosty voice.  “This is not an ideal situation, Diana.”

“One more week,” Diana pleaded.  “I can lock this down by then and we can close the deal once everyone’s back in their offices on the 26th.  Plenty of time to get everything sorted before the end of the year.”

Nia thought for a long moment.  “Fine,” she said coldly. “One more week.  But if we’re still having this same conversation by the 25th -”

“We won’t be.”

“All right, then.  Go finish your dinner. Get me a sale agreement, or get yourself a ring on your finger.  I can work with either, but the first one is tidier.”

“I know.”

“In the meantime, some tactful attempts to sabotage the ball wouldn’t hurt. See what you can do to slow the train down, at least, before he gets the whole town on his side.”

“There’s not going to be any Christmas Ball, Nia.  He doesn’t have the staff for it.”

“You’re underestimating his charisma, I think.  That could be dangerous.”

“Nobody in this town knows Marcus Kane like I do,” snapped Diana feelingly, thinking at this moment of a small, laughing face framed in soft brown hair, trading casual jokes about the past over a kitchen table stacked high with gingerbread angels.   _“Nobody.”_

“Prove me wrong, then,” said Nia agreeably. “I would love for that to be true.”

Then she hung up.

“Everything okay?” Marcus asked her carefully, as she made her way back inside, dropping her phone back into her purse and sliding into the seat across from him.  

She forced a smile, though her heart was still pounding.  “Fine,” she said briskly. “Work.”

“I got you a glass of Pinot Grigio, is that okay? They’re out of the Riesling you like.”

“That’s fine,” she said absently, taking a sip and barely tasting it.  “Thank you.”

Marcus watched her thoughtfully for a long moment, as though weighing something before saying it out loud.  “Diana,” he began hesitantly, “do you ever wonder -”

“So sorry for the delay!” chirped their young waiter, arriving at that precise moment and cutting off Marcus mid-thought.  They’d had this waiter before, and Diana found his attitude grating, but she’d never been more grateful for it than she was now, for derailing Marcus’ train of thought.  “Your husband asked me to wait for you before I came back with the specials.”

“Not _quite_ yet,” Diana corrected flirtatiously, smiling at the waiter and taking Marcus’ hand firmly in hers across the table, “but I like the sound of ‘husband’ a great deal more than ‘fiance’, don’t you?”

“Well, congratulations,” said the waiter, “when’s the big day?”

“I think there’s something very romantic about a Christmas Eve wedding,” said Diana, a plan dawning in her mind.  “Don’t you?”

“Absolutely,” agreed the waiter.  “Very romantic.”

“Diana, maybe we should -”

“And we’ll both have the steak frites,” she said, interrupting him smoothly, “since we’re celebrating.”

Marcus looked, for a moment, like he was about to object, but finally he just nodded.  “Sure,” he said. “That sounds great.”

“I’m sorry, darling, you were saying something,” she said to him, giving his hand a squeeze as the waiter departed.  “What was it?”

Silence.

“Nothing,” he finally said.  “We can talk about it later.”


End file.
